Choice history biases evidence accumulation: a cross-species comparison from humans to mice

Abstract

Mice are increasingly used to study the neural circuit-level basis of behavior, often with the ultimate goal of extrapolating these insights to humans. To generalize insights about neural functioning across species, it is crucial to ensure correspondence in behavioral and cognitive strategy. We previously showed that human observers evidence accumulation is biased by previous choices (Urai et al., 2019). To replicate these findings across species, we fit Diffusion Decision Models (Fengler et al., 2025) to behavioral data from 62 mice performing a standardized perceptual decision-making task (The International Brain Laboratory et al., 2021). We identified the same cognitive strategy of history-dependent evidence accumulation: individual differences in choice repetition were explained by a history-dependent bias in the rate of evidence accumulation rather than its starting point. We argue that history-biased evidence integration reflects a fundamental aspect of perceptual decision-making, that may transcend the specific species.