Are there jumps in evidence accumulation, and what, if anything, do they reflect psychologically? An analysis of Levy Flights models of decision-making.

ABSTRACT: According to existing theories of simple decision-making, decisions are initiated by continuously sampling and accumulating perceptual evidence until a threshold value has been reached. Many models, such as the diffusion decision model, assume a noisy accumulation process, described mathematically as a stochastic Wiener process with Gaussian distributed noise. Recently, an alternative account of decision-making has been proposed in the Lévy Flights (LF) model, in which accumulation noise is characterized by a heavy-tailed power-law distribution, controlled by a parameter, [Formula: see text]. The LF model produces sudden large "jumps" in evidence accumulation that are not produced by the standard Wiener diffusion model, which some have argued provide better fits to data. It remains unclear

SUBMITTER: Rasanan AHH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11420318 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature