Decision prioritization and causal reasoning in decision hierarchies.

ABSTRACT: From cooking a meal to finding a route to a destination, many real life decisions can be decomposed into a hierarchy of sub-decisions. In a hierarchy, choosing which decision to think about requires planning over a potentially vast space of possible decision sequences. To gain insight into how people decide what to decide on, we studied a novel task that combines perceptual decision making, active sensing and hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning. Human participants had to find a target hidden at the lowest level of a decision tree. They could solicit information from the different nodes of the decision tree to gather noisy evidence about the target's location. Feedback was given only after errors at the leaf nodes and provided ambiguous evidence about the cause of the error. Despite t

SUBMITTER: Zylberberg A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8719712 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature