The Tweedledum and Tweedledee of dynamic decisions: Discriminating between diffusion decision and accumulator models.

ABSTRACT: Theories of dynamic decision-making are typically built on evidence accumulation, which is modeled using racing accumulators or diffusion models that track a shifting balance of support over time. However, these two types of models are only two special cases of a more general evidence accumulation process where options correspond to directions in an accumulation space. Using this generalized evidence accumulation approach as a starting point, I identify four ways to discriminate between absolute-evidence and relative-evidence models. First, an experimenter can look at the information that decision-makers considered to identify whether there is a filtering of near-zero evidence samples, which is characteristic of a relative-evidence decision rule (e.g., diffusion decision model). Second, an

SUBMITTER: Kvam PD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12000211 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature