Misspecified models create the appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice.

ABSTRACT: Decision scientists have grown increasingly interested in how people adaptively control their decision making, exploring how metacognitive factors influence how people accumulate evidence and commit to a choice. A recent study proposed a novel form of such adaptive control, whereby the values of one's options  contribute to both the formation of a decision and the effortful invigoration of a response. In this framework, the control process was operationalized in a drift diffusion model as the lowering of the decision threshold on difficult trials. Reanalyzing the data from this experiment, we establish alternative explanations for these findings. We show that the reported evidence for controlled threshold adjustments can be explained away by task confounds, time-dependent collapses in deci

SUBMITTER: Ritz H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12824220 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature