ABSTRACT
To come to an optimal joint decision, individuals must share information with each other and, importantly, weigh that information by its reliability1,2. It has been well established that isolated individuals can accurately weigh information when combining different sources of sensory information3,4,5. Little is known, however, about how, or even whether, two individuals can accurately combine information that they communicate with each other. To investigate this issue, we examined the behavior of pairs of individuals in a simple perceptual decision task, and we asked how signals from the same sensory modality (vision) in the brains of two different individuals could be combined through social interaction.
