Continued influence effect

Biological Parallel

Even when informed that a food source is depleted, foraging ants continue following old pheromone trails—initial information creates persistent behavioral patterns that resist updating. This is path dependence in action: early-encoded patterns establish default predictions that require substantial contradictory evidence to override. The continued influence effect reveals memory's conservative bias: discarding working models is metabolically expensive, so the brain maintains outdated information until replacement cost is justified.