Joint decision-making on two visual perception systems

Decision-making is an interdisciplinary problem that has been the focus of many studies, particularly by interactive pairs of visual cognition systems. In a series of experiments, Bahrami et al. (2010) showed that dyadic interaction is beneficial only if participants communicate with each other about their confidence in making a judgment. Aside from data combination using both simple and weighted average, Hsu et al. (2006) first described the use of combinatorial fusion to combine multiple scoring systems (MSS). In this experiment, sixteen trials were conducted using pairs of individuals as visual cognition systems. Participants observed a target being thrown in a grassy field which could not be seen once it had landed, allowing them to then independently perceive the position of the target and determine their confidence level. The results of these trials were analyzed for performance of score and rank combinations relative to both the original cognition systems of the individuals and to simple and weighted averages of their systems. We demonstrated, using combinatorial fusion, that the combination of two visual perception systems is better than each of the individual systems only if they perform relatively well and they are diverse.