Incorporation of a cost of deliberation time in perceptual decision making.

ABSTRACT: Many decisions benefit from the accumulation of evidence obtained sequentially over time. In such circumstances, the decision maker must balance speed against accuracy, and the nature of this tradeoff mediates competing desiderata and costs, especially those associated with the passage of time. A neural mechanism to achieve this balance is to accumulate evidence in suitable units and to terminate the deliberation when enough evidence has accrued. To accommodate time costs, it has been hypothesized that the criterion to terminate a decision may become lax as a function of time. Here we tested this hypothesis by manipulating the cost of time in a perceptual choice-reaction time task. Participants discriminated the direction of motion in a dynamic random-dot display, which varied in difficult

SUBMITTER: Kira S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10862799 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature