Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Existing research has developed a working understanding of borderline personality disorder (BPD) patient traits and behav-ior in everyday life, but the subtleties of their cognitive processes during decision-making remains unclear. To understandhow reliance on previous experiences (priors) versus current sensory information (likelihoods) in the decision-makingprocess may differ for those with BPD in comparison to those within neuro-typical population, we implemented a coin-catching behavioral task with varying levels of prior and likelihood uncertainty. We hypothesized that, in accordance totypical BPD characteristics, BPD patients will rely significantly more on likelihood information even when likelihoodinformation is more unreliable than prior information. Analyzing the results using Bayesian statistics, we found evidencesuggesting that both the BPD patient group and the neuro-typical control group utilized prior and likelihood informa-tion similarly in decision-making. We theorize that BPD characteristics that are prominent in social interactions may notexactly replicate in non-social settings.