'If you are good, I get better': the role of social hierarchy in perceptual decision-making.

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Santamaría-García, Hernando; Pannunzi, Mario; Ayneto, Alba; Deco, Gustavo; Sebastián-Gallés, Nuria

2014-10-01

So far, it was unclear if social hierarchy could influence sensory or perceptual cognitive processes. We evaluated the effects of social hierarchy on these processes using a basic visual perceptual decision task. We constructed a social hierarchy where participants performed the perceptual task separately with two covertly simulated players (superior, inferior). Participants were faster (better) when performing the discrimination task with the superior player. We studied the time course when social hierarchy was processed using event-related potentials and observed hierarchical effects even in early stages of sensory-perceptual processing, suggesting early top-down modulation by social hierarchy. Moreover, in a parallel analysis, we fitted a drift-diffusion model (DDM) to the results to evaluate the decision making process of this perceptual task in the context of a social hierarchy. Consistently, the DDM pointed to nondecision time (probably perceptual encoding) as the principal period influenced by social hierarchy. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

‘If you are good, I get better’: the role of social hierarchy in perceptual decision-making

Science.gov (United States)

Pannunzi, Mario; Ayneto, Alba; Deco, Gustavo; Sebastián-Gallés, Nuria

2014-01-01

So far, it was unclear if social hierarchy could influence sensory or perceptual cognitive processes. We evaluated the effects of social hierarchy on these processes using a basic visual perceptual decision task. We constructed a social hierarchy where participants performed the perceptual task separately with two covertly simulated players (superior, inferior). Participants were faster (better) when performing the discrimination task with the superior player. We studied the time course when social hierarchy was processed using event-related potentials and observed hierarchical effects even in early stages of sensory-perceptual processing, suggesting early top–down modulation by social hierarchy. Moreover, in a parallel analysis, we fitted a drift-diffusion model (DDM) to the results to evaluate the decision making process of this perceptual task in the context of a social hierarchy. Consistently, the DDM pointed to nondecision time (probably perceptual encoding) as the principal period influenced by social hierarchy. PMID:23946003

Cortical Network Dynamics of Perceptual Decision-Making in the Human Brain

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Markus eSiegel

2011-02-01

Full Text Available Goal-directed behavior requires the flexible transformation of sensory evidence about our environment into motor actions. Studies of perceptual decision-making have shown that this transformation is distributed across several widely separated brain regions. Yet, little is known about how decision-making emerges from the dynamic interactions among these regions. Here, we review a series of studies, in which we characterized the cortical network interactions underlying a perceptual decision process in the human brain. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG to measure the large-scale cortical population dynamics underlying each of the sub-processes involved in this decision: the encoding of sensory evidence and action plan, the mapping between the two, and the attentional selection of task-relevant evidence. We found that these sub-processes are mediated by neuronal oscillations within specific frequency ranges. Localized gamma-band oscillations in sensory and motor cortices reflect the encoding of the sensory evidence and motor plan. Large-scale oscillations across widespread cortical networks mediate the integrative processes connecting these local networks: Gamma- and beta-band oscillations across frontal, parietal and sensory cortices serve the selection of relevant sensory evidence and its flexible mapping onto action plans. In sum, our results suggest that perceptual decisions are mediated by oscillatory interactions within overlapping local and large-scale cortical networks.

Task-related modulation of effective connectivity during perceptual decision making: Dissociation between dorsal and ventral prefrontal cortex

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Rei eAkaishi

2013-07-01

Full Text Available The dorsal and ventral parts of the lateral prefrontal cortex have been thought to play distinct roles in decision making. Although its dorsal part such as the frontal eye field (FEF is shown to play roles in accumulation of sensory information during perceptual decision making, the role of the ventral prefrontal cortex (PFv is not well-documented. Previous studies have suggested that the PFv is involved in selective attention to the task-relevant information and is associated with accuracy of the behavioral performance. It is unknown, however, whether the accumulation and selection processes are anatomically dissociated between the FEF and PFv. Here we show that, by using concurrent TMS and EEG recording, the short-latency (20 – 40 ms TMS-evoked potentials after stimulation of the FEF change as a function of the time to behavioral response, whereas those after stimulation of the PFv change depending on whether the response is correct or not. The potentials after stimulation of either region did not show significant interaction between time to response and performance accuracy, suggesting dissociation between the processes subserved by the FEF and PFv networks. The results are consistent with the idea that the network involving the FEF plays a role in information accumulation, whereas the network involving the PFv plays a role in selecting task relevant information. In addition, stimulation of the FEF and PFv induced activation in common regions in the dorsolateral and medial frontal cortices, suggesting convergence of information processed in the two regions. Taken together, the results suggest dissociation between the FEF and PFv networks for their computational roles in perceptual decision making. The study also highlights the advantage of TMS-EEG technique in investigating the computational processes subserved by the neural network in the human brain with a high temporal resolution.

Task-related modulation of effective connectivity during perceptual decision making: dissociation between dorsal and ventral prefrontal cortex.

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Akaishi, Rei; Ueda, Naoko; Sakai, Katsuyuki

2013-01-01

The dorsal and ventral parts of the lateral prefrontal cortex have been thought to play distinct roles in decision making. Although its dorsal part such as the frontal eye field (FEF) is shown to play roles in accumulation of sensory information during perceptual decision making, the role of the ventral prefrontal cortex (PFv) is not well-documented. Previous studies have suggested that the PFv is involved in selective attention to the task-relevant information and is associated with accuracy of the behavioral performance. It is unknown, however, whether the accumulation and selection processes are anatomically dissociated between the FEF and PFv. Here we show that, by using concurrent TMS and EEG recording, the short-latency (20-40 ms) TMS-evoked potentials after stimulation of the FEF change as a function of the time to behavioral response, whereas those after stimulation of the PFv change depending on whether the response is correct or not. The potentials after stimulation of either region did not show significant interaction between time to response and performance accuracy, suggesting dissociation between the processes subserved by the FEF and PFv networks. The results are consistent with the idea that the network involving the FEF plays a role in information accumulation, whereas the network involving the PFv plays a role in selecting task relevant information. In addition, stimulation of the FEF and PFv induced activation in common regions in the dorsolateral and medial frontal cortices, suggesting convergence of information processed in the two regions. Taken together, the results suggest dissociation between the FEF and PFv networks for their computational roles in perceptual decision making. The study also highlights the advantage of TMS-EEG technique in investigating the computational processes subserved by the neural network in the human brain with a high temporal resolution.

Perceptual Decision-Making as Probabilistic Inference by Neural Sampling.

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Haefner, Ralf M; Berkes, Pietro; Fiser, József

2016-05-04

We address two main challenges facing systems neuroscience today: understanding the nature and function of cortical feedback between sensory areas and of correlated variability. Starting from the old idea of perception as probabilistic inference, we show how to use knowledge of the psychophysical task to make testable predictions for the influence of feedback signals on early sensory representations. Applying our framework to a two-alternative forced choice task paradigm, we can explain multiple empirical findings that have been hard to account for by the traditional feedforward model of sensory processing, including the task dependence of neural response correlations and the diverging time courses of choice probabilities and psychophysical kernels. Our model makes new predictions and characterizes a component of correlated variability that represents task-related information rather than performance-degrading noise. It demonstrates a normative way to integrate sensory and cognitive components into physiologically testable models of perceptual decision-making. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Variability in visual working memory ability limits the efficiency of perceptual decision making.

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Ester, Edward F; Ho, Tiffany C; Brown, Scott D; Serences, John T

2014-04-02

The ability to make rapid and accurate decisions based on limited sensory information is a critical component of visual cognition. Available evidence suggests that simple perceptual discriminations are based on the accumulation and integration of sensory evidence over time. However, the memory system(s) mediating this accumulation are unclear. One candidate system is working memory (WM), which enables the temporary maintenance of information in a readily accessible state. Here, we show that individual variability in WM capacity is strongly correlated with the speed of evidence accumulation in speeded two-alternative forced choice tasks. This relationship generalized across different decision-making tasks, and could not be easily explained by variability in general arousal or vigilance. Moreover, we show that performing a difficult discrimination task while maintaining a concurrent memory load has a deleterious effect on the latter, suggesting that WM storage and decision making are directly linked.

The Attentional Drift Diffusion Model of Simple Perceptual Decision-Making

OpenAIRE

Gabriela Tavares; Pietro Perona; Antonio Rangel; Antonio Rangel

2017-01-01

Perceptual decisions requiring the comparison of spatially distributed stimuli that are fixated sequentially might be influenced by fluctuations in visual attention. We used two psychophysical tasks with human subjects to investigate the extent to which visual attention influences simple perceptual choices, and to test the extent to which the attentional Drift Diffusion Model (aDDM) provides a good computational description of how attention affects the underlying decision processes. We find e...

Economic decision-making compared with an equivalent motor task.

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Wu, Shih-Wei; Delgado, Mauricio R; Maloney, Laurence T

2009-04-14

There is considerable evidence that human economic decision-making deviates from the predictions of expected utility theory (EUT) and that human performance conforms to EUT in many perceptual and motor decision tasks. It is possible that these results reflect a real difference in decision-making in the 2 domains but it is also possible that the observed discrepancy simply reflects typical differences in experimental design. We developed a motor task that is mathematically equivalent to choosing between lotteries and used it to compare how the same subject chose between classical economic lotteries and the same lotteries presented in equivalent motor form. In experiment 1, we found that subjects are more risk seeking in deciding between motor lotteries. In experiment 2, we used cumulative prospect theory to model choice and separately estimated the probability weighting functions and the value functions for each subject carrying out each task. We found no patterned differences in how subjects represented outcome value in the motor and the classical tasks. However, the probability weighting functions for motor and classical tasks were markedly and significantly different. Those for the classical task showed a typical tendency to overweight small probabilities and underweight large probabilities, and those for the motor task showed the opposite pattern of probability distortion. This outcome also accounts for the increased risk-seeking observed in the motor tasks of experiment 1. We conclude that the same subject distorts probability, but not value, differently in making identical decisions in motor and classical form.

How attention influences perceptual decision making: Single-trial EEG correlates of drift-diffusion model parameters

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Nunez, Michael D.; Vandekerckhove, Joachim; Srinivasan, Ramesh

2016-01-01

Perceptual decision making can be accounted for by drift-diffusion models, a class of decision-making models that assume a stochastic accumulation of evidence on each trial. Fitting response time and accuracy to a drift-diffusion model produces evidence accumulation rate and non-decision time parameter estimates that reflect cognitive processes. Our goal is to elucidate the effect of attention on visual decision making. In this study, we show that measures of attention obtained from simultaneous EEG recordings can explain per-trial evidence accumulation rates and perceptual preprocessing times during a visual decision making task. Models assuming linear relationships between diffusion model parameters and EEG measures as external inputs were fit in a single step in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. The EEG measures were features of the evoked potential (EP) to the onset of a masking noise and the onset of a task-relevant signal stimulus. Single-trial evoked EEG responses, P200s to the onsets of visual noise and N200s to the onsets of visual signal, explain single-trial evidence accumulation and preprocessing times. Within-trial evidence accumulation variance was not found to be influenced by attention to the signal or noise. Single-trial measures of attention lead to better out-of-sample predictions of accuracy and correct reaction time distributions for individual subjects. PMID:28435173

How attention influences perceptual decision making: Single-trial EEG correlates of drift-diffusion model parameters.

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Nunez, Michael D; Vandekerckhove, Joachim; Srinivasan, Ramesh

2017-02-01

Perceptual decision making can be accounted for by drift-diffusion models, a class of decision-making models that assume a stochastic accumulation of evidence on each trial. Fitting response time and accuracy to a drift-diffusion model produces evidence accumulation rate and non-decision time parameter estimates that reflect cognitive processes. Our goal is to elucidate the effect of attention on visual decision making. In this study, we show that measures of attention obtained from simultaneous EEG recordings can explain per-trial evidence accumulation rates and perceptual preprocessing times during a visual decision making task. Models assuming linear relationships between diffusion model parameters and EEG measures as external inputs were fit in a single step in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. The EEG measures were features of the evoked potential (EP) to the onset of a masking noise and the onset of a task-relevant signal stimulus. Single-trial evoked EEG responses, P200s to the onsets of visual noise and N200s to the onsets of visual signal, explain single-trial evidence accumulation and preprocessing times. Within-trial evidence accumulation variance was not found to be influenced by attention to the signal or noise. Single-trial measures of attention lead to better out-of-sample predictions of accuracy and correct reaction time distributions for individual subjects.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Does Not Influence the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff in Perceptual Decision-making: Evidence from Three Independent Studies.

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de Hollander, Gilles; Labruna, Ludovica; Sellaro, Roberta; Trutti, Anne; Colzato, Lorenza S; Ratcliff, Roger; Ivry, Richard B; Forstmann, Birte U

2016-09-01

In perceptual decision-making tasks, people balance the speed and accuracy with which they make their decisions by modulating a response threshold. Neuroimaging studies suggest that this speed-accuracy tradeoff is implemented in a corticobasal ganglia network that includes an important contribution from the pre-SMA. To test this hypothesis, we used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to modulate neural activity in pre-SMA while participants performed a simple perceptual decision-making task. Participants viewed a pattern of moving dots and judged the direction of the global motion. In separate trials, they were cued to either respond quickly or accurately. We used the diffusion decision model to estimate the response threshold parameter, comparing conditions in which participants received sham or anodal tDCS. In three independent experiments, we failed to observe an influence of tDCS on the response threshold. Additional, exploratory analyses showed no influence of tDCS on the duration of nondecision processes or on the efficiency of information processing. Taken together, these findings provide a cautionary note, either concerning the causal role of pre-SMA in decision-making or on the utility of tDCS for modifying response caution in decision-making tasks.

Evidence accumulation detected in BOLD signal using slow perceptual decision making

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Krueger, Paul M.; van Vugt, Marieke K.; Simen, Patrick; Nystrom, Leigh; Holmes, Philip; Cohen, Jonathan D.

2017-01-01

BACKGROUND: We assessed whether evidence accumulation could be observed in the BOLD signal during perceptual decision making. This presents a challenge since the hemodynamic response is slow, while perceptual decisions are typically fast. NEW METHOD: Guided by theoretical predictions of the drift

Joint perceptual decision-making: A case study in explanatory pluralism

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Abney, Drew; Dale, Rick; Yoshimi, Jeffrey

2014-01-01

and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described abstractly, but has rarely been applied to concrete cases. We present a case study of explanatory pluralism. We discuss three separate ways of studying the same phenomenon: a perceptual decision- making...... task (Bahrami et al., 2010), where pairs of subjects share information to jointly individuate an oddball stimulus among a set of distractors. Each approach analyzed the same corpus but targeted different units of analysis at different levels of description: decision-making at the behavioral level......, confidence sharing at the linguistic level, and acoustic energy at the physical level. We discuss the utility of explanatory pluralism for describing this complex, multiscale phenomenon, show ways in which this case study sheds new light on the concept of pluralism, and highlight good practices to critically...

Effects of category-specific costs on neural systems for perceptual decision-making.

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Fleming, Stephen M; Whiteley, Louise; Hulme, Oliver J; Sahani, Maneesh; Dolan, Raymond J

2010-06-01

Perceptual judgments are often biased by prospective losses, leading to changes in decision criteria. Little is known about how and where sensory evidence and cost information interact in the brain to influence perceptual categorization. Here we show that prospective losses systematically bias the perception of noisy face-house images. Asymmetries in category-specific cost were associated with enhanced blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal in a frontoparietal network. We observed selective activation of parahippocampal gyrus for changes in category-specific cost in keeping with the hypothesis that loss functions enact a particular task set that is communicated to visual regions. Across subjects, greater shifts in decision criteria were associated with greater activation of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Our results support a hypothesis that costs bias an intermediate representation between perception and action, expressed via general effects on frontal cortex, and selective effects on extrastriate cortex. These findings indicate that asymmetric costs may affect a neural implementation of perceptual decision making in a similar manner to changes in category expectation, constituting a step toward accounting for how prospective losses are flexibly integrated with sensory evidence in the brain.

Dissociating sensory from decision processes in human perceptual decision making

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mostert, P.; Kok, P.; Lange, F.P. de

2015-01-01

A key question within systems neuroscience is how the brain translates physical stimulation into a behavioral response: perceptual decision making. To answer this question, it is important to dissociate the neural activity underlying the encoding of sensory information from the activity underlying

Individual differences in attention influence perceptual decision making.

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Nunez, Michael D; Srinivasan, Ramesh; Vandekerckhove, Joachim

2015-01-01

Sequential sampling decision-making models have been successful in accounting for reaction time (RT) and accuracy data in two-alternative forced choice tasks. These models have been used to describe the behavior of populations of participants, and explanatory structures have been proposed to account for between individual variability in model parameters. In this study we show that individual differences in behavior from a novel perceptual decision making task can be attributed to (1) differences in evidence accumulation rates, (2) differences in variability of evidence accumulation within trials, and (3) differences in non-decision times across individuals. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we demonstrate that these differences in cognitive variables, in turn, can be explained by attentional differences as measured by phase-locking of steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) responses to the signal and noise components of the visual stimulus. Parameters of a cognitive model (a diffusion model) were obtained from accuracy and RT distributions and related to phase-locking indices (PLIs) of SSVEPs with a single step in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. Participants who were able to suppress the SSVEP response to visual noise in high frequency bands were able to accumulate correct evidence faster and had shorter non-decision times (preprocessing or motor response times), leading to more accurate responses and faster response times. We show that the combination of cognitive modeling and neural data in a hierarchical Bayesian framework relates physiological processes to the cognitive processes of participants, and that a model with a new (out-of-sample) participant's neural data can predict that participant's behavior more accurately than models without physiological data.

Dissociating sensory from decision processes in human perceptual decision making

OpenAIRE

Mostert, Pim; Kok, Peter; de Lange, Floris P.

2015-01-01

A key question within systems neuroscience is how the brain translates physical stimulation into a behavioral response: perceptual decision making. To answer this question, it is important to dissociate the neural activity underlying the encoding of sensory information from the activity underlying the subsequent temporal integration into a decision variable. Here, we adopted a decoding approach to empirically assess this dissociation in human magnetoencephalography recordings. We used a funct...

Evidence Accumulation and Choice Maintenance Are Dissociated in Human Perceptual Decision Making.

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Mads Lund Pedersen

Full Text Available Perceptual decision making in monkeys relies on decision neurons, which accumulate evidence and maintain choices until a response is given. In humans, several brain regions have been proposed to accumulate evidence, but it is unknown if these regions also maintain choices. To test if accumulator regions in humans also maintain decisions we compared delayed and self-paced responses during a face/house discrimination decision making task. Computational modeling and fMRI results revealed dissociated processes of evidence accumulation and decision maintenance, with potential accumulator activations found in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, right inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral insula. Potential maintenance activation spanned the frontal pole, temporal gyri, precuneus and the lateral occipital and frontal orbital cortices. Results of a quantitative reverse inference meta-analysis performed to differentiate the functions associated with the identified regions did not narrow down potential accumulation regions, but suggested that response-maintenance might rely on a verbalization of the response.

Neural correlates and neural computations in posterior parietal cortex during perceptual decision-making

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Alexander eHuk

2012-10-01

Full Text Available A recent line of work has found remarkable success in relating perceptual decision-making and the spiking activity in the macaque lateral intraparietal area (LIP. In this review, we focus on questions about the neural computations in LIP that are not answered by demonstrations of neural correlates of psychological processes. We highlight three areas of limitations in our current understanding of the precise neural computations that might underlie neural correlates of decisions: (1 empirical questions not yet answered by existing data; (2 implementation issues related to how neural circuits could actually implement the mechanisms suggested by both physiology and psychology; and (3 ecological constraints related to the use of well-controlled laboratory tasks and whether they provide an accurate window on sensorimotor computation. These issues motivate the adoption of a more general encoding-decoding framework that will be fruitful for more detailed contemplation of how neural computations in LIP relate to the formation of perceptual decisions.

Temporal characteristics of the influence of punishment on perceptual decision making in the human brain.

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Blank, Helen; Biele, Guido; Heekeren, Hauke R; Philiastides, Marios G

2013-02-27

Perceptual decision making is the process by which information from sensory systems is combined and used to influence our behavior. In addition to the sensory input, this process can be affected by other factors, such as reward and punishment for correct and incorrect responses. To investigate the temporal dynamics of how monetary punishment influences perceptual decision making in humans, we collected electroencephalography (EEG) data during a perceptual categorization task whereby the punishment level for incorrect responses was parametrically manipulated across blocks of trials. Behaviorally, we observed improved accuracy for high relative to low punishment levels. Using multivariate linear discriminant analysis of the EEG, we identified multiple punishment-induced discriminating components with spatially distinct scalp topographies. Compared with components related to sensory evidence, components discriminating punishment levels appeared later in the trial, suggesting that punishment affects primarily late postsensory, decision-related processing. Crucially, the amplitude of these punishment components across participants was predictive of the size of the behavioral improvements induced by punishment. Finally, trial-by-trial changes in prestimulus oscillatory activity in the alpha and gamma bands were good predictors of the amplitude of these components. We discuss these findings in the context of increased motivation/attention, resulting from increases in punishment, which in turn yields improved decision-related processing.

The speed and accuracy of perceptual decisions in a random-tone pitch task

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mulder, M.J.; Keuken, M.C.; van Maanen, L.; Boekel, W.E.; Forstmann, B.U.; Wagenmakers, E.J.

2013-01-01

Research in perceptual decision making is dominated by paradigms that tap the visual system, such as the random-dot motion (RDM) paradigm. In this study, we investigated whether the behavioral signature of perceptual decisions in the auditory domain is similar to those observed in the visual domain.

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task.

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Qiao-Tasserit, Emilie; Garcia Quesada, Maria; Antico, Lia; Bavelier, Daphne; Vuilleumier, Patrik; Pichon, Swann

2017-01-01

Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants' propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emilie Qiao-Tasserit

Full Text Available Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral clips increased participants' propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task

Science.gov (United States)

Garcia Quesada, Maria; Antico, Lia; Bavelier, Daphne; Vuilleumier, Patrik; Pichon, Swann

2017-01-01

Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants’ propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions. PMID:28151976

Interoceptive and exteroceptive attention have opposite effects on subsequent somatosensory perceptual decision making.

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Mirams, Laura; Poliakoff, Ellen; Brown, Richard J; Lloyd, Donna M

2012-01-01

Evidence suggests that interoceptive and exteroceptive attention might have different perceptual effects. However, the effects of these different types of body-focused attention have never been directly compared. The current research investigated how interoceptive and exteroceptive attention affect subsequent performance on the somatic signal detection task (SSDT). In Experiment 1, 37 participants completed the SSDT under usual testing conditions and after performing an interoceptive heartbeat perception task. This task led to a more liberal response criterion, leading to increased touch reports in the presence and absence of a target vibration. This finding is consistent with suggestions that attending internally contributes to physical symptom reporting in patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). In Experiment 2, 40 participants completed the SSDT before and after an exteroceptive grating orientation task. This task led to a more stringent response criterion, leading to decreased touch reports in the presence and absence of the target, possibly via a reduction in sensory noise. This work demonstrates that internal and external body-focused attention can have opposite effects on subsequent somatic perceptual decision making and suggests that attentional training could be useful for patients reporting MUS.

The Attentional Drift Diffusion Model of Simple Perceptual Decision-Making

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gabriela Tavares

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Perceptual decisions requiring the comparison of spatially distributed stimuli that are fixated sequentially might be influenced by fluctuations in visual attention. We used two psychophysical tasks with human subjects to investigate the extent to which visual attention influences simple perceptual choices, and to test the extent to which the attentional Drift Diffusion Model (aDDM provides a good computational description of how attention affects the underlying decision processes. We find evidence for sizable attentional choice biases and that the aDDM provides a reasonable quantitative description of the relationship between fluctuations in visual attention, choices and reaction times. We also find that exogenous manipulations of attention induce choice biases consistent with the predictions of the model.

The Attentional Drift Diffusion Model of Simple Perceptual Decision-Making.

Science.gov (United States)

Tavares, Gabriela; Perona, Pietro; Rangel, Antonio

2017-01-01

Perceptual decisions requiring the comparison of spatially distributed stimuli that are fixated sequentially might be influenced by fluctuations in visual attention. We used two psychophysical tasks with human subjects to investigate the extent to which visual attention influences simple perceptual choices, and to test the extent to which the attentional Drift Diffusion Model (aDDM) provides a good computational description of how attention affects the underlying decision processes. We find evidence for sizable attentional choice biases and that the aDDM provides a reasonable quantitative description of the relationship between fluctuations in visual attention, choices and reaction times. We also find that exogenous manipulations of attention induce choice biases consistent with the predictions of the model.

Striatal activation reflects urgency in perceptual decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

van Maanen, Leendert; Fontanesi, Laura; Hawkins, Guy E; Forstmann, Birte U

2016-10-01

Deciding between multiple courses of action often entails an increasing need to do something as time passes - a sense of urgency. This notion of urgency is not incorporated in standard theories of speeded decision making that assume information is accumulated until a critical fixed threshold is reached. Yet, it is hypothesized in novel theoretical models of decision making. In two experiments, we investigated the behavioral and neural evidence for an "urgency signal" in human perceptual decision making. Experiment 1 found that as the duration of the decision making process increased, participants made a choice based on less evidence for the selected option. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, and additionally found that variability in this effect across participants covaried with activation in the striatum. We conclude that individual differences in susceptibility to urgency are reflected by striatal activation. By dynamically updating a response threshold, the striatum is involved in signaling urgency in humans. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Individual differences in attention influence perceptual decision making

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Michael Dawson Nunez

2015-02-01

Full Text Available Sequential sampling decision-making models have been successful in accounting for reactiontime (RT and accuracy data in two-alternative forced choice tasks. These models have beenused to describe the behavior of populations of participants, and explanatory structures havebeen proposed to account for between individual variability in model parameters. In this studywe show that individual differences in behavior from a novel perceptual decision making taskcan be attributed to 1 differences in evidence accumulation rates, 2 differences in variability ofevidence accumulation within trials, and 3 differences in non-decision times across individuals.Using electroencephalography (EEG, we demonstrate that these differences in cognitivevariables, in turn, can be explained by attentional differences as measured by phase-lockingof steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP responses to the signal and noise componentsof the visual stimulus. Parameters of a cognitive model (a diffusion model were obtained fromaccuracy and RT distributions and related to phase-locking indices (PLIs of SSVEPs with asingle step in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. Participants who were able to suppress theSSVEP response to visual noise in high frequency bands were able to accumulate correctevidence faster and had shorter non-decision times (preprocessing or motor response times,leading to more accurate responses and faster response times. We show that the combinationof cognitive modeling and neural data in a hierarchical Bayesian framework relates physiologicalprocesses to the cognitive processes of participants, and that a model with a new (out-of-sample participant’s neural data can predict that participant’s behavior more accurately thanmodels without physiological data.

Perceptual learning effect on decision and confidence thresholds.

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Solovey, Guillermo; Shalom, Diego; Pérez-Schuster, Verónica; Sigman, Mariano

2016-10-01

Practice can enhance of perceptual sensitivity, a well-known phenomenon called perceptual learning. However, the effect of practice on subjective perception has received little attention. We approach this problem from a visual psychophysics and computational modeling perspective. In a sequence of visual search experiments, subjects significantly increased the ability to detect a "trained target". Before and after training, subjects performed two psychophysical protocols that parametrically vary the visibility of the "trained target": an attentional blink and a visual masking task. We found that confidence increased after learning only in the attentional blink task. Despite large differences in some observables and task settings, we identify common mechanisms for decision-making and confidence. Specifically, our behavioral results and computational model suggest that perceptual ability is independent of processing time, indicating that changes in early cortical representations are effective, and learning changes decision criteria to convey choice and confidence. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Joint perceptual decision-making: A case study in explanatory pluralism

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Drew Hamilton Abney

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described abstractly, but has rarely been applied to concrete cases. We present a case study of explanatory pluralism. We discuss three separate ways of studying the same phenomenon: a perceptual decision- making task (Bahrami et al., 2010, where pairs of subjects share information to jointly individuate an oddball stimulus among a set of distractors. Each approach analyzed the same corpus but targeted different units of analysis at different levels of description: decision-making at the behavioral level, confidence sharing at the linguistic level, and acoustic energy at the physical level. We discuss the utility of explanatory pluralism for describing this complex, multiscale phenomenon, show ways in which this case study sheds new light on the concept of pluralism, and highlight good practices to critically assess and complement approaches.

Building bridges between perceptual and economic decision-making: neural and computational mechanisms

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Christopher eSummerfield

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Investigation into the neural and computational bases of decision-making has proceeded in two parallel but distinct streams. Perceptual decision making (PDM is concerned with how observers detect, discriminate and categorise noisy sensory information. Economic decision making (EDM explores how options are selected on the basis of their reinforcement history. Traditionally, the subfields of PDM and EDM have employed different paradigms, proposed different mechanistic models, explored different brain regions, disagreed about whether decisions approach optimality. Nevertheless, we argue that there is a common framework for understanding decisions made in both domains, under which an agent has to combine sensory information (what is the stimulus with value information (what is it worth. We review computational models of the decision process typically used in PDM, based around the idea that decisions involve a serial integration of evidence, and assess their applicability to decisions between good and gambles. Subsequently, we consider the contribution of three key brain regions – the parietal cortex, the basal ganglia, and the orbitofrontal cortex – to perceptual and economic decision-making, with a focus on the mechanisms by which sensory and reward information are integrated during choice. We find that although the parietal cortex is often implicated in the integration of sensory evidence, there is evidence for its role in encoding the expected value of a decision. Similarly, although much research has emphasised the role of the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex in value-guided choices, they may play an important role in categorisation of perceptual information. In conclusion, we consider how findings from the two fields might be brought together, in order to move towards a general framework for understanding decision-making in humans and other primates.

‘If you are good, I get better’: the role of social hierarchy in perceptual decision-making

OpenAIRE

Santamaría-García, Hernando; Pannunzi, Mario; Ayneto, Alba; Deco, Gustavo; Sebastián-Gallés, Nuria

2013-01-01

So far, it was unclear if social hierarchy could influence sensory or perceptual cognitive processes. We evaluated the effects of social hierarchy on these processes using a basic visual perceptual decision task. We constructed a social hierarchy where participants performed the perceptual task separately with two covertly simulated players (superior, inferior). Participants were faster (better) when performing the discrimination task with the superior player. We studied the time course when ...

Expectations Do Not Alter Early Sensory Processing during Perceptual Decision-Making.

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Rungratsameetaweemana, Nuttida; Itthipuripat, Sirawaj; Salazar, Annalisa; Serences, John T

2018-06-13

frameworks posit that expectations modulate decision-making by biasing late stages of decision-making including the selection and execution of motor responses. In contrast, recent accounts suggest that expectations also modulate decisions by improving the quality of early sensory processing. However, these effects could instead reflect the influence of selective attention. Here we examine the effect of expectations about sensory features and motor responses on a set of electroencephalography (EEG) markers that index early sensory processing and later post-perceptual processing. Counter to recent empirical results, expectations have little effect on early sensory processing but instead modulate EEG markers of time-on-task and cognitive conflict. Copyright © 2018 the authors 0270-6474/18/385632-17$15.00/0.

Roles of Time Hazard in Perceptual Decision Making under High Time Pressure

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Minju Kim

2011-05-01

Full Text Available The drift diffusion model (DDM has been successful in capturing the joint dynamics of accuracy and latency data in various perceptual decision making tasks. We evaluated how well the DDM describes dynamics of perceptual decision when subjects were under a varying degree of time pressure. We collected choice and latency responses from human subjects, who discriminated the size of a thin ring stimulus with a varying degree of uncertainty. The degree of time pressure was manipulated both by giving subjects an explicit instruction of different time limits across sessions (0.7 ∼ 1.2 s and by providing feedback to responses that were made later than those time limits. When fitted to the data of choice and latency, the three major variants of the DDM (with static bounds & gain, with time-varying bounds, and with time-varying gain showed a systematic pattern of latency-dependent prediction errors. Here we propose a new variant of the DDM, which adopts a ‘boundary for time hazard’ on the time axis in addition to the choice boundary on the choice-evidence axis in decision space. Our model did not exhibit the biased pattern of errors and was superior than the other models in goodness of fit to the data.

Shared mechanisms of perceptual learning and decision making.

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Law, Chi-Tat; Gold, Joshua I

2010-04-01

Perceptual decisions require the brain to weigh noisy evidence from sensory neurons to form categorical judgments that guide behavior. Here we review behavioral and neurophysiological findings suggesting that at least some forms of perceptual learning do not appear to affect the response properties of neurons that represent the sensory evidence. Instead, improved perceptual performance results from changes in how the sensory evidence is selected and weighed to form the decision. We discuss the implications of this idea for possible sites and mechanisms of training-induced improvements in perceptual processing in the brain. Copyright © 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Not just for consumers: context effects are fundamental to decision making.

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Trueblood, Jennifer S; Brown, Scott D; Heathcote, Andrew; Busemeyer, Jerome R

2013-06-01

Context effects--preference changes that depend on the availability of other options--have attracted a great deal of attention among consumer researchers studying high-level decision tasks. In the experiments reported here, we showed that these effects also arise in simple perceptual-decision-making tasks. This finding casts doubt on explanations limited to consumer choice and high-level decisions, and it indicates that context effects may be amenable to a general explanation at the level of the basic decision process. We demonstrated for the first time that three important context effects from the preferential-choice literature--similarity, attraction, and compromise effects--all occurred within a single perceptual-decision task. Not only do our results challenge previous explanations for context effects proposed by consumer researchers, but they also challenge the choice rules assumed in theories of perceptual decision making.

Perceptual and categorical decision making: goal-relevant representation of two domains at different levels of abstraction.

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Shankar, Swetha; Kayser, Andrew S

2017-06-01

To date it has been unclear whether perceptual decision making and rule-based categorization reflect activation of similar cognitive processes and brain regions. On one hand, both map potentially ambiguous stimuli to a smaller set of motor responses. On the other hand, decisions about perceptual salience typically concern concrete sensory representations derived from a noisy stimulus, while categorization is typically conceptualized as an abstract decision about membership in a potentially arbitrary set. Previous work has primarily examined these types of decisions in isolation. Here we independently varied salience in both the perceptual and categorical domains in a random dot-motion framework by manipulating dot-motion coherence and motion direction relative to a category boundary, respectively. Behavioral and modeling results suggest that categorical (more abstract) information, which is more relevant to subjects' decisions, is weighted more strongly than perceptual (more concrete) information, although they also have significant interactive effects on choice. Within the brain, BOLD activity within frontal regions strongly differentiated categorical salience and weakly differentiated perceptual salience; however, the interaction between these two factors activated similar frontoparietal brain networks. Notably, explicitly evaluating feature interactions revealed a frontal-parietal dissociation: parietal activity varied strongly with both features, but frontal activity varied with the combined strength of the information that defined the motor response. Together, these data demonstrate that frontal regions are driven by decision-relevant features and argue that perceptual decisions and rule-based categorization reflect similar cognitive processes and activate similar brain networks to the extent that they define decision-relevant stimulus-response mappings. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Here we study the behavioral and neural dynamics of perceptual categorization when

Cortical network dynamics of perceptual decision-making in the human brain

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Siegel, M.; Engel, A.K.; Donner, T.H.

2011-01-01

Goal-directed behavior requires the flexible transformation of sensory evidence about our environment into motor actions. Studies of perceptual decision-making have shown that this transformation is distributed across several widely separated brain regions. Yet, little is known about how

Evidence of different underlying processes in pattern recall and decision-making.

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Gorman, Adam D; Abernethy, Bruce; Farrow, Damian

2015-01-01

The visual search characteristics of expert and novice basketball players were recorded during pattern recall and decision-making tasks to determine whether the two tasks shared common visual-perceptual processing strategies. The order in which participants entered the pattern elements in the recall task was also analysed to further examine the nature of the visual-perceptual strategies and the relative emphasis placed upon particular pattern features. The experts demonstrated superior performance across the recall and decision-making tasks [see also Gorman, A. D., Abernethy, B., & Farrow, D. (2012). Classical pattern recall tests and the prospective nature of expert performance. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 1151-1160; Gorman, A. D., Abernethy, B., & Farrow, D. (2013a). Is the relationship between pattern recall and decision-making influenced by anticipatory recall? The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 2219-2236)] but a number of significant differences in the visual search data highlighted disparities in the processing strategies, suggesting that recall skill may utilize different underlying visual-perceptual processes than those required for accurate decision-making performance in the natural setting. Performance on the recall task was characterized by a proximal-to-distal order of entry of the pattern elements with participants tending to enter the players located closest to the ball carrier earlier than those located more distal to the ball carrier. The results provide further evidence of the underlying perceptual processes employed by experts when extracting visual information from complex and dynamic patterns.

Dynamics of individual perceptual decisions

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Clark, Torin K.; Lu, Yue M.; Karmali, Faisal

2015-01-01

Perceptual decision making is fundamental to a broad range of fields including neurophysiology, economics, medicine, advertising, law, etc. Although recent findings have yielded major advances in our understanding of perceptual decision making, decision making as a function of time and frequency (i.e., decision-making dynamics) is not well understood. To limit the review length, we focus most of this review on human findings. Animal findings, which are extensively reviewed elsewhere, are included when beneficial or necessary. We attempt to put these various findings and data sets, which can appear to be unrelated in the absence of a formal dynamic analysis, into context using published models. Specifically, by adding appropriate dynamic mechanisms (e.g., high-pass filters) to existing models, it appears that a number of otherwise seemingly disparate findings from the literature might be explained. One hypothesis that arises through this dynamic analysis is that decision making includes phasic (high pass) neural mechanisms, an evidence accumulator and/or some sort of midtrial decision-making mechanism (e.g., peak detector and/or decision boundary). PMID:26467513

Heuristics in Managing Complex Clinical Decision Tasks in Experts' Decision Making.

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Islam, Roosan; Weir, Charlene; Del Fiol, Guilherme

2014-09-01

Clinical decision support is a tool to help experts make optimal and efficient decisions. However, little is known about the high level of abstractions in the thinking process for the experts. The objective of the study is to understand how clinicians manage complexity while dealing with complex clinical decision tasks. After approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB), three clinical experts were interviewed the transcripts from these interviews were analyzed. We found five broad categories of strategies by experts for managing complex clinical decision tasks: decision conflict, mental projection, decision trade-offs, managing uncertainty and generating rule of thumb. Complexity is created by decision conflicts, mental projection, limited options and treatment uncertainty. Experts cope with complexity in a variety of ways, including using efficient and fast decision strategies to simplify complex decision tasks, mentally simulating outcomes and focusing on only the most relevant information. Understanding complex decision making processes can help design allocation based on the complexity of task for clinical decision support design.

Elucidating poor decision-making in a rat gambling task.

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Marion Rivalan

Full Text Available Although poor decision-making is a hallmark of psychiatric conditions such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, pathological gambling or substance abuse, a fraction of healthy individuals exhibit similar poor decision-making performances in everyday life and specific laboratory tasks such as the Iowa Gambling Task. These particular individuals may provide information on risk factors or common endophenotypes of these mental disorders. In a rodent version of the Iowa gambling task--the Rat Gambling Task (RGT, we identified a population of poor decision makers, and assessed how these rats scored for several behavioral traits relevant to executive disorders: risk taking, reward seeking, behavioral inflexibility, and several aspects of impulsivity. First, we found that poor decision-making could not be well predicted by single behavioral and cognitive characteristics when considered separately. By contrast, a combination of independent traits in the same individual, namely risk taking, reward seeking, behavioral inflexibility, as well as motor impulsivity, was highly predictive of poor decision-making. Second, using a reinforcement-learning model of the RGT, we confirmed that only the combination of extreme scores on these traits could induce maladaptive decision-making. Third, the model suggested that a combination of these behavioral traits results in an inaccurate representation of rewards and penalties and inefficient learning of the environment. Poor decision-making appears as a consequence of the over-valuation of high-reward-high-risk options in the task. Such a specific psychological profile could greatly impair clinically healthy individuals in decision-making tasks and may predispose to mental disorders with similar symptoms.

A Dynamic Model for Decision Making During Memory Retrieval

Science.gov (United States)

2015-10-26

a  knowledge  task  (pseudo-­‐ lexical  decision),  a  perceptual  task  (perceptual  identification),  and  an  episodic... lexical decision), a perceptual task (perceptual identification), and an episodic recognition task (recognition memory for occurrence of a test item...Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(1), 135-150. Cox, G. E., Kachergis, G., and Shiffrin, R. M. (2012). Gaussian process regression for trajectory analysis . In

Hysteresis as an Implicit Prior in Tactile Spatial Decision Making

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Thiel, Sabrina D.; Bitzer, Sebastian; Nierhaus, Till; Kalberlah, Christian; Preusser, Sven; Neumann, Jane; Nikulin, Vadim V.; van der Meer, Elke; Villringer, Arno; Pleger, Burkhard

2014-01-01

Perceptual decisions not only depend on the incoming information from sensory systems but constitute a combination of current sensory evidence and internally accumulated information from past encounters. Although recent evidence emphasizes the fundamental role of prior knowledge for perceptual decision making, only few studies have quantified the relevance of such priors on perceptual decisions and examined their interplay with other decision-relevant factors, such as the stimulus properties. In the present study we asked whether hysteresis, describing the stability of a percept despite a change in stimulus property and known to occur at perceptual thresholds, also acts as a form of an implicit prior in tactile spatial decision making, supporting the stability of a decision across successively presented random stimuli (i.e., decision hysteresis). We applied a variant of the classical 2-point discrimination task and found that hysteresis influenced perceptual decision making: Participants were more likely to decide ‘same’ rather than ‘different’ on successively presented pin distances. In a direct comparison between the influence of applied pin distances (explicit stimulus property) and hysteresis, we found that on average, stimulus property explained significantly more variance of participants’ decisions than hysteresis. However, when focusing on pin distances at threshold, we found a trend for hysteresis to explain more variance. Furthermore, the less variance was explained by the pin distance on a given decision, the more variance was explained by hysteresis, and vice versa. Our findings suggest that hysteresis acts as an implicit prior in tactile spatial decision making that becomes increasingly important when explicit stimulus properties provide decreasing evidence. PMID:24587045

The neural system of metacognition accompanying decision-making in the prefrontal cortex

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Qiu, Lirong; Su, Jie; Ni, Yinmei; Bai, Yang; Zhang, Xuesong; Li, Xiaoli

2018-01-01

Decision-making is usually accompanied by metacognition, through which a decision maker monitors uncertainty regarding a decision and may then consequently revise the decision. These metacognitive processes can occur prior to or in the absence of feedback. However, the neural mechanisms of metacognition remain controversial. One theory proposes an independent neural system for metacognition in the prefrontal cortex (PFC); the other, that metacognitive processes coincide and overlap with the systems used for the decision-making process per se. In this study, we devised a novel “decision–redecision” paradigm to investigate the neural metacognitive processes involved in redecision as compared to the initial decision-making process. The participants underwent a perceptual decision-making task and a rule-based decision-making task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that the anterior PFC, including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and lateral frontopolar cortex (lFPC), were more extensively activated after the initial decision. The dACC activity in redecision positively scaled with decision uncertainty and correlated with individual metacognitive uncertainty monitoring abilities—commonly occurring in both tasks—indicating that the dACC was specifically involved in decision uncertainty monitoring. In contrast, the lFPC activity seen in redecision processing was scaled with decision uncertainty reduction and correlated with individual accuracy changes—positively in the rule-based decision-making task and negatively in the perceptual decision-making task. Our results show that the lFPC was specifically involved in metacognitive control of decision adjustment and was subject to different control demands of the tasks. Therefore, our findings support that a separate neural system in the PFC is essentially involved in metacognition and further, that functions of the PFC in metacognition are dissociable. PMID:29684004

Posterior Probability Matching and Human Perceptual Decision Making.

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Richard F Murray

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Probability matching is a classic theory of decision making that was first developed in models of cognition. Posterior probability matching, a variant in which observers match their response probabilities to the posterior probability of each response being correct, is being used increasingly often in models of perception. However, little is known about whether posterior probability matching is consistent with the vast literature on vision and hearing that has developed within signal detection theory. Here we test posterior probability matching models using two tools from detection theory. First, we examine the models' performance in a two-pass experiment, where each block of trials is presented twice, and we measure the proportion of times that the model gives the same response twice to repeated stimuli. We show that at low performance levels, posterior probability matching models give highly inconsistent responses across repeated presentations of identical trials. We find that practised human observers are more consistent across repeated trials than these models predict, and we find some evidence that less practised observers more consistent as well. Second, we compare the performance of posterior probability matching models on a discrimination task to the performance of a theoretical ideal observer that achieves the best possible performance. We find that posterior probability matching is very inefficient at low-to-moderate performance levels, and that human observers can be more efficient than is ever possible according to posterior probability matching models. These findings support classic signal detection models, and rule out a broad class of posterior probability matching models for expert performance on perceptual tasks that range in complexity from contrast discrimination to symmetry detection. However, our findings leave open the possibility that inexperienced observers may show posterior probability matching behaviour, and our methods

Monitoring supports performance in a dual-task paradigm involving a risky decision-making task and a working memory task

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Bettina eGathmann

2015-02-01

Full Text Available Performing two cognitively demanding tasks at the same time is known to decrease performance. The current study investigates the underlying executive functions of a dual-tasking situation involving the simultaneous performance of decision making under explicit risk and a working memory task. It is suggested that making a decision and performing a working memory task at the same time should particularly require monitoring - an executive control process supervising behavior and the state of processing on two tasks. To test the role of a supervisory/monitoring function in such a dual-tasking situation we investigated 122 participants with the Game of Dice Task plus 2-back task (GDT plus 2-back task. This dual task requires participants to make decisions under risk and to perform a 2-back working memory task at the same time. Furthermore, a task measuring a set of several executive functions gathered in the term concept formation (Modified Card Sorting Test, MCST and the newly developed Balanced Switching Task (BST, measuring monitoring in particular, were used. The results demonstrate that concept formation and monitoring are involved in the simultaneous performance of decision making under risk and a working memory task. In particular, the mediation analysis revealed that BST performance partially mediates the influence of MCST performance on the GDT plus 2-back task. These findings suggest that monitoring is one important subfunction for superior performance in a dual-tasking situation including decision making under risk and a working memory task.

Monitoring supports performance in a dual-task paradigm involving a risky decision-making task and a working memory task

Science.gov (United States)

Gathmann, Bettina; Schiebener, Johannes; Wolf, Oliver T.; Brand, Matthias

2015-01-01

Performing two cognitively demanding tasks at the same time is known to decrease performance. The current study investigates the underlying executive functions of a dual-tasking situation involving the simultaneous performance of decision making under explicit risk and a working memory task. It is suggested that making a decision and performing a working memory task at the same time should particularly require monitoring—an executive control process supervising behavior and the state of processing on two tasks. To test the role of a supervisory/monitoring function in such a dual-tasking situation we investigated 122 participants with the Game of Dice Task plus 2-back task (GDT plus 2-back task). This dual task requires participants to make decisions under risk and to perform a 2-back working memory task at the same time. Furthermore, a task measuring a set of several executive functions gathered in the term concept formation (Modified Card Sorting Test, MCST) and the newly developed Balanced Switching Task (BST), measuring monitoring in particular, were used. The results demonstrate that concept formation and monitoring are involved in the simultaneous performance of decision making under risk and a working memory task. In particular, the mediation analysis revealed that BST performance partially mediates the influence of MCST performance on the GDT plus 2-back task. These findings suggest that monitoring is one important subfunction for superior performance in a dual-tasking situation including decision making under risk and a working memory task. PMID:25741308

Revisiting the evidence for collapsing boundaries and urgency signals in perceptual decision-making.

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Hawkins, Guy E; Forstmann, Birte U; Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan; Ratcliff, Roger; Brown, Scott D

2015-02-11

For nearly 50 years, the dominant account of decision-making holds that noisy information is accumulated until a fixed threshold is crossed. This account has been tested extensively against behavioral and neurophysiological data for decisions about consumer goods, perceptual stimuli, eyewitness testimony, memories, and dozens of other paradigms, with no systematic misfit between model and data. Recently, the standard model has been challenged by alternative accounts that assume that less evidence is required to trigger a decision as time passes. Such "collapsing boundaries" or "urgency signals" have gained popularity in some theoretical accounts of neurophysiology. Nevertheless, evidence in favor of these models is mixed, with support coming from only a narrow range of decision paradigms compared with a long history of support from dozens of paradigms for the standard theory. We conducted the first large-scale analysis of data from humans and nonhuman primates across three distinct paradigms using powerful model-selection methods to compare evidence for fixed versus collapsing bounds. Overall, we identified evidence in favor of the standard model with fixed decision boundaries. We further found that evidence for static or dynamic response boundaries may depend on specific paradigms or procedures, such as the extent of task practice. We conclude that the difficulty of selecting between collapsing and fixed bounds models has received insufficient attention in previous research, calling into question some previous results. Copyright © 2015 the authors 0270-6474/15/352476-09$15.00/0.

[Decision making and executive function in severe traumatic brain injured patients: validation of a decision-making task and correlated features].

Science.gov (United States)

Wiederkehr, S; Barat, M; Dehail, P; de Sèze, M; Lozes-Boudillon, S; Giroire, J-M

2005-02-01

At the chronic stage, severe traumatic brain injured (TBI) patients experience difficulty in making decisions. Several studies have demonstrated the involvement of the prefrontal cortex, in particular the orbitofrontal region, in decision-making. The aim of the present study was to validate a decision-making task in this population and to ascertain whether the components of their dysexecutive syndrome may affect their decision-making and lead to difficulties for social rehabilitation. Fifteen TBI patients and 15 controlled subjects matched for age, sex and years of education were assessed by a battery of executive tests (GREFEX) and by the gambling task (GT). The TBI subjects performed significantly worse than the controlled group in five out of six GREFEX tests. The TBI choices are significantly more disadvantageous than the choices of the control group when considering the three last blocks of 20 cards of the GT. The GT total score correlated significantly with execution time of the Stroop interference condition and the Trail Making Task B, as well as with the two measures (correct sequence span and number of crossed boxes) of the double condition of Baddeley's task. We postulate that executive functioning (supervisory attentional system) influence performance in the gambling task through mechanisms of inhibitory control, divided attention and working memory. Thus, this task seems to be determined by multiple factors; the process of decision-making may depend on frontal integrity.

How mechanisms of perceptual decision-making affect the psychometric function.

Science.gov (United States)

Gold, Joshua I; Ding, Long

2013-04-01

Psychometric functions are often interpreted in the context of Signal Detection Theory, which emphasizes a distinction between sensory processing and non-sensory decision rules in the brain. This framework has helped to relate perceptual sensitivity to the "neurometric" sensitivity of sensory-driven neural activity. However, perceptual sensitivity, as interpreted via Signal Detection Theory, is based on not just how the brain represents relevant sensory information, but also how that information is read out to form the decision variable to which the decision rule is applied. Here we discuss recent advances in our understanding of this readout process and describe its effects on the psychometric function. In particular, we show that particular aspects of the readout process can have specific, identifiable effects on the threshold, slope, upper asymptote, time dependence, and choice dependence of psychometric functions. To illustrate these points, we emphasize studies of perceptual learning that have identified changes in the readout process that can lead to changes in these aspects of the psychometric function. We also discuss methods that have been used to distinguish contributions of the sensory representation versus its readout to psychophysical performance. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

P2-17: Individual Differences in Dynamic Criterion Shifts during Perceptual Decision Making

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Issac Rhim

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Perceptual decision-making involves placing an optimal criterion on the axis of encoded sensory evidence to maximize outcomes for choices. Optimal criterion setting becomes critical particularly when neural representations of sensory inputs are noisy and feedbacks for perceptual choices vary over time in an unpredictable manner. Here we monitored time courses of decision criteria that are adopted by human subjects while abruptly shifting the criterion of stochastic feedback to perceptual choices with certain amounts in an unpredictable direction and at an unpredictable point of time. Subjects viewed a brief (0.3 s, thin (.07 deg annulus around the fixation and were forced to judge whether the annulus was smaller or larger than an unknown boundary. We estimated moment-to-moment criteria by fitting a cumulative Gaussian function to the data within a sliding window of trials that are locked to a shift in feedback criterion. Unpredictable shifts in feedback criterion successfully induced shifts in actual decision criterion towards an optimal criterion for many of subjects, but with time delay and amount of shifts varying across individual subjects. There were disproportionately more numbers of overshooters (reaching and then surpassing the optimal criterion required than undershooters (subpar reach, with a significant anti-correlation with sensory sensitivity. To find a mechanism that generates these individual differences, we developed a dynamic criterion learning model by modifying a reinforcement learning model, which assumes that a criterion is adjusted every trial by a weighted discrepancy between actual and expected rewards.

Humans Optimize Decision-Making by Delaying Decision Onset

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Teichert, Tobias; Ferrera, Vincent P.; Grinband, Jack

2014-01-01

Why do humans make errors on seemingly trivial perceptual decisions? It has been shown that such errors occur in part because the decision process (evidence accumulation) is initiated before selective attention has isolated the relevant sensory information from salient distractors. Nevertheless, it is typically assumed that subjects increase accuracy by prolonging the decision process rather than delaying decision onset. To date it has not been tested whether humans can strategically delay decision onset to increase response accuracy. To address this question we measured the time course of selective attention in a motion interference task using a novel variant of the response signal paradigm. Based on these measurements we estimated time-dependent drift rate and showed that subjects should in principle be able trade speed for accuracy very effectively by delaying decision onset. Using the time-dependent estimate of drift rate we show that subjects indeed delay decision onset in addition to raising response threshold when asked to stress accuracy over speed in a free reaction version of the same motion-interference task. These findings show that decision onset is a critical aspect of the decision process that can be adjusted to effectively improve decision accuracy. PMID:24599295

Perceptual Training in Beach Volleyball Defence: Different Effects of Gaze-Path Cueing on Gaze and Decision-Making

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André eKlostermann

2015-12-01

Full Text Available For perceptual-cognitive skill training, a variety of intervention methods has been proposed, including the so-called colour-cueing method which aims on superior gaze-path learning by applying visual markers. However, recent findings challenge this method, especially, with regards to its actual effects on gaze behaviour. Consequently, after a preparatory study on the identification of appropriate visual cues for life-size displays, a perceptual-training experiment on decision-making in beach volleyball was conducted, contrasting two cueing interventions (functional vs. dysfunctional gaze path with a conservative control condition (anticipation-related instructions. Gaze analyses revealed learning effects for the dysfunctional group only. Regarding decision-making, all groups showed enhanced performance with largest improvements for the control group followed by the functional and the dysfunctional group. Hence, the results confirm cueing effects on gaze behaviour, but they also question its benefit for enhancing decision-making. However, before completely denying the method’s value, optimisations should be checked regarding, for instance, cueing-pattern characteristics and gaze-related feedback.

Asynchronous decision making in a memorized paddle pressing task.

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Dankert, James R; Olson, Byron; Si, Jennie

2008-12-01

This paper presents a method for asynchronous decision making using recorded neural data in a binary decision task. This is a demonstration of a technique for developing motor cortical neural prosthetics that do not rely on external cued timing information. The system presented in this paper uses support vector machines and leaky integrate-and-fire elements to predict directional paddle presses. In addition to the traditional metrics of accuracy, asynchronous systems must also optimize the time needed to make a decision. The system presented is able to predict paddle presses with a median accuracy of 88% and all decisions are made before the time of the actual paddle press. An alternative bit rate measure of performance is defined to show that the system proposed here is able to perform the task with the same efficiency as the rats.

Confidence Leak in Perceptual Decision Making.

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Rahnev, Dobromir; Koizumi, Ai; McCurdy, Li Yan; D'Esposito, Mark; Lau, Hakwan

2015-11-01

People live in a continuous environment in which the visual scene changes on a slow timescale. It has been shown that to exploit such environmental stability, the brain creates a continuity field in which objects seen seconds ago influence the perception of current objects. What is unknown is whether a similar mechanism exists at the level of metacognitive representations. In three experiments, we demonstrated a robust intertask confidence leak-that is, confidence in one's response on a given task or trial influencing confidence on the following task or trial. This confidence leak could not be explained by response priming or attentional fluctuations. Better ability to modulate confidence leak predicted higher capacity for metacognition as well as greater gray matter volume in the prefrontal cortex. A model based on normative principles from Bayesian inference explained the results by postulating that observers subjectively estimate the perceptual signal strength in a stable environment. These results point to the existence of a novel metacognitive mechanism mediated by regions in the prefrontal cortex. © The Author(s) 2015.

Dissociating neural variability related to stimulus quality and response times in perceptual decision-making.

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Bode, Stefan; Bennett, Daniel; Sewell, David K; Paton, Bryan; Egan, Gary F; Smith, Philip L; Murawski, Carsten

2018-03-01

According to sequential sampling models, perceptual decision-making is based on accumulation of noisy evidence towards a decision threshold. The speed with which a decision is reached is determined by both the quality of incoming sensory information and random trial-by-trial variability in the encoded stimulus representations. To investigate those decision dynamics at the neural level, participants made perceptual decisions while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was conducted. On each trial, participants judged whether an image presented under conditions of high, medium, or low visual noise showed a piano or a chair. Higher stimulus quality (lower visual noise) was associated with increased activation in bilateral medial occipito-temporal cortex and ventral striatum. Lower stimulus quality was related to stronger activation in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). When stimulus quality was fixed, faster response times were associated with a positive parametric modulation of activation in medial prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex, while slower response times were again related to more activation in PPC, DLPFC and insula. Our results suggest that distinct neural networks were sensitive to the quality of stimulus information, and to trial-to-trial variability in the encoded stimulus representations, but that reaching a decision was a consequence of their joint activity. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Negative symptoms in schizophrenia are associated with aberrant striato-cortical connectivity in a rewarded perceptual decision-making task.

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Reckless, Greg E; Andreassen, Ole A; Server, Andres; Østefjells, Tiril; Jensen, Jimmy

2015-01-01

Negative symptoms in schizophrenia have been associated with structural and functional changes in the prefrontal cortex. They often persist after treatment with antipsychotic medication which targets, in particular, the ventral striatum (VS). As schizophrenia has been suggested to arise from dysfunctional connectivity between neural networks, it is possible that residual aberrant striato-cortical connectivity in medicated patients plays a role in enduring negative symptomology. The present study examined the relationship between striato-cortical connectivity and negative symptoms in medicated schizophrenia patients. We manipulated motivation in a perceptual decision-making task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Comparing healthy controls (n = 21) and medicated patients with schizophrenia (n = 18) we investigated how motivation-mediated changes in VS activation affected functional connectivity with the frontal cortex, and how changes in connectivity strength from the neutral to motivated condition related to negative symptom severity. A pattern of aberrant striato-cortical connectivity was observed in the presence of intact VS, but altered left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) motivation-mediated activation in patients. The more severe the patient's negative symptoms, the less the connectivity strength between the right VS and left IFG changed from the neutral to the motivated condition. Despite aberrant striato-cortical connectivity and altered recruitment of the left IFG among patients, both patients and healthy controls adopted a more liberal response strategy in the motivated compared to the neutral condition. The present findings suggest that there is a link between dysfunctional striato-cortical connectivity and negative symptom severity, and offer a possible explanation as to why negative symptoms persist after treatment with antipsychotics.

The impact of natural aging on computational and neural indices of perceptual decision making: A review.

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Dully, Jessica; McGovern, David P; O'Connell, Redmond G

2018-02-10

It is well established that natural aging negatively impacts on a wide variety of cognitive functions and research has sought to identify core neural mechanisms that may account for these disparate changes. A central feature of any cognitive task is the requirement to translate sensory information into an appropriate action - a process commonly known as perceptual decision making. While computational, psychophysical, and neurophysiological research has made substantial progress in establishing the key computations and neural mechanisms underpinning decision making, it is only relatively recently that this knowledge has begun to be applied to research on aging. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of this work which is beginning to offer new insights into the core psychological processes that mediate age-related cognitive decline in adults aged 65 years and over. Mathematical modelling studies have consistently reported that older adults display longer non-decisional processing times and implement more conservative decision policies than their younger counterparts. However, there are limits on what we can learn from behavioural modeling alone and neurophysiological analyses can play an essential role in empirically validating model predictions and in pinpointing the precise neural mechanisms that are impacted by aging. Although few studies to date have explicitly examined correspondences between computational models and neural data with respect to cognitive aging, neurophysiological studies have already highlighted age-related changes at multiple levels of the sensorimotor hierarchy that are likely to be consequential for decision making behaviour. Here, we provide an overview of this literature and suggest some future directions for the field. Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Relation between belief and performance in perceptual decision making.

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Drugowitsch, Jan; Moreno-Bote, Rubén; Pouget, Alexandre

2014-01-01

In an uncertain and ambiguous world, effective decision making requires that subjects form and maintain a belief about the correctness of their choices, a process called meta-cognition. Prediction of future outcomes and self-monitoring are only effective if belief closely matches behavioral performance. Equality between belief and performance is also critical for experimentalists to gain insight into the subjects' belief by simply measuring their performance. Assuming that the decision maker holds the correct model of the world, one might indeed expect that belief and performance should go hand in hand. Unfortunately, we show here that this is rarely the case when performance is defined as the percentage of correct responses for a fixed stimulus, a standard definition in psychophysics. In this case, belief equals performance only for a very narrow family of tasks, whereas in others they will only be very weakly correlated. As we will see it is possible to restore this equality in specific circumstances but this remedy is only effective for a decision-maker, not for an experimenter. We furthermore show that belief and performance do not match when conditioned on task difficulty--as is common practice when plotting the psychometric curve--highlighting common pitfalls in previous neuroscience work. Finally, we demonstrate that miscalibration and the hard-easy effect observed in humans' and other animals' certainty judgments could be explained by a mismatch between the experimenter's and decision maker's expected distribution of task difficulties. These results have important implications for experimental design and are of relevance for theories that aim to unravel the nature of meta-cognition.

Decision-making under risk conditions is susceptible to interference by a secondary executive task.

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Starcke, Katrin; Pawlikowski, Mirko; Wolf, Oliver T; Altstötter-Gleich, Christine; Brand, Matthias

2011-05-01

Recent research suggests two ways of making decisions: an intuitive and an analytical one. The current study examines whether a secondary executive task interferes with advantageous decision-making in the Game of Dice Task (GDT), a decision-making task with explicit and stable rules that taps executive functioning. One group of participants performed the original GDT solely, two groups performed either the GDT and a 1-back or a 2-back working memory task as a secondary task simultaneously. Results show that the group which performed the GDT and the secondary task with high executive load (2-back) decided less advantageously than the group which did not perform a secondary executive task. These findings give further evidence for the view that decision-making under risky conditions taps into the rational-analytical system which acts in a serial and not parallel way as performance on the GDT is disturbed by a parallel task that also requires executive resources.

A Cognitive Modeling Approach to Strategy Formation in Dynamic Decision Making

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Sabine Prezenski

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Decision-making is a high-level cognitive process based on cognitive processes like perception, attention, and memory. Real-life situations require series of decisions to be made, with each decision depending on previous feedback from a potentially changing environment. To gain a better understanding of the underlying processes of dynamic decision-making, we applied the method of cognitive modeling on a complex rule-based category learning task. Here, participants first needed to identify the conjunction of two rules that defined a target category and later adapt to a reversal of feedback contingencies. We developed an ACT-R model for the core aspects of this dynamic decision-making task. An important aim of our model was that it provides a general account of how such tasks are solved and, with minor changes, is applicable to other stimulus materials. The model was implemented as a mixture of an exemplar-based and a rule-based approach which incorporates perceptual-motor and metacognitive aspects as well. The model solves the categorization task by first trying out one-feature strategies and then, as a result of repeated negative feedback, switching to two-feature strategies. Overall, this model solves the task in a similar way as participants do, including generally successful initial learning as well as reversal learning after the change of feedback contingencies. Moreover, the fact that not all participants were successful in the two learning phases is also reflected in the modeling data. However, we found a larger variance and a lower overall performance of the modeling data as compared to the human data which may relate to perceptual preferences or additional knowledge and rules applied by the participants. In a next step, these aspects could be implemented in the model for a better overall fit. In view of the large interindividual differences in decision performance between participants, additional information about the underlying

A Cognitive Modeling Approach to Strategy Formation in Dynamic Decision Making.

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Prezenski, Sabine; Brechmann, André; Wolff, Susann; Russwinkel, Nele

2017-01-01

Decision-making is a high-level cognitive process based on cognitive processes like perception, attention, and memory. Real-life situations require series of decisions to be made, with each decision depending on previous feedback from a potentially changing environment. To gain a better understanding of the underlying processes of dynamic decision-making, we applied the method of cognitive modeling on a complex rule-based category learning task. Here, participants first needed to identify the conjunction of two rules that defined a target category and later adapt to a reversal of feedback contingencies. We developed an ACT-R model for the core aspects of this dynamic decision-making task. An important aim of our model was that it provides a general account of how such tasks are solved and, with minor changes, is applicable to other stimulus materials. The model was implemented as a mixture of an exemplar-based and a rule-based approach which incorporates perceptual-motor and metacognitive aspects as well. The model solves the categorization task by first trying out one-feature strategies and then, as a result of repeated negative feedback, switching to two-feature strategies. Overall, this model solves the task in a similar way as participants do, including generally successful initial learning as well as reversal learning after the change of feedback contingencies. Moreover, the fact that not all participants were successful in the two learning phases is also reflected in the modeling data. However, we found a larger variance and a lower overall performance of the modeling data as compared to the human data which may relate to perceptual preferences or additional knowledge and rules applied by the participants. In a next step, these aspects could be implemented in the model for a better overall fit. In view of the large interindividual differences in decision performance between participants, additional information about the underlying cognitive processes from

Gaze-contingent training enhances perceptual skill acquisition

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mann, D.L.; Ryu, D.; Abernethy, B.A.; Poolton, J.M.

2016-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine whether decision-making skill in perceptual-cognitive tasks could be enhanced using a training technique that impaired selective areas of the visual field. Recreational basketball players performed perceptual training over 3 days while viewing with a

Performing a secondary executive task with affective stimuli interferes with decision making under risk conditions.

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Gathmann, Bettina; Pawlikowski, Mirko; Schöler, Tobias; Brand, Matthias

2014-05-01

Previous studies demonstrated that executive functions are crucial for advantageous decision making under risk and that therefore decision making is disrupted when working memory capacity is demanded while working on a decision task. While some studies also showed that emotions can affect decision making under risk, it is unclear how affective processing and executive functions predict decision-making performance in interaction. The current experimental study used a between-subjects design to examine whether affective pictures (positive and negative pictures compared to neutral pictures), included in a parallel executive task (working memory 2-back task), have an impact on decision making under risk as assessed by the Game of Dice Task (GDT). Moreover, the performance GDT plus 2-back task was compared to the performance in the GDT without any additional task (GDT solely). The results show that the performance in the GDT differed between groups (positive, negative, neutral, and GDT solely). The groups with affective pictures, especially those with positive pictures in the 2-back task, showed more disadvantageous decisions in the GDT than the groups with neutral pictures and the group performing the GDT without any additional task. However, executive functions moderated the effect of the affective pictures. Regardless of affective influence, subjects with good executive functions performed advantageously in the GDT. These findings support the assumption that executive functions and emotional processing interact in predicting decision making under risk.

Cortical topography of intracortical inhibition influences the speed of decision making.

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Wilimzig, Claudia; Ragert, Patrick; Dinse, Hubert R

2012-02-21

The neocortex contains orderly topographic maps; however, their functional role remains controversial. Theoretical studies have suggested a role in minimizing computational costs, whereas empirical studies have focused on spatial localization. Using a tactile multiple-choice reaction time (RT) task before and after the induction of perceptual learning through repetitive sensory stimulation, we extend the framework of cortical topographies by demonstrating that the topographic arrangement of intracortical inhibition contributes to the speed of human perceptual decision-making processes. RTs differ among fingers, displaying an inverted U-shaped function. Simulations using neural fields show the inverted U-shaped RT distribution as an emergent consequence of lateral inhibition. Weakening inhibition through learning shortens RTs, which is modeled through topographically reorganized inhibition. Whereas changes in decision making are often regarded as an outcome of higher cortical areas, our data show that the spatial layout of interaction processes within representational maps contributes to selection and decision-making processes.

Perceptual Biases in Relation to Paranormal and Conspiracy Beliefs.

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van Elk, Michiel

2015-01-01

Previous studies have shown that one's prior beliefs have a strong effect on perceptual decision-making and attentional processing. The present study extends these findings by investigating how individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are related to perceptual and attentional biases. Two field studies were conducted in which visitors of a paranormal conducted a perceptual decision making task (i.e. the face/house categorization task; Experiment 1) or a visual attention task (i.e. the global/local processing task; Experiment 2). In the first experiment it was found that skeptics compared to believers more often incorrectly categorized ambiguous face stimuli as representing a house, indicating that disbelief rather than belief in the paranormal is driving the bias observed for the categorization of ambiguous stimuli. In the second experiment, it was found that skeptics showed a classical 'global-to-local' interference effect, whereas believers in conspiracy theories were characterized by a stronger 'local-to-global interference effect'. The present study shows that individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are associated with perceptual and attentional biases, thereby extending the growing body of work in this field indicating effects of cultural learning on basic perceptual processes.

Perceptual Biases in Relation to Paranormal and Conspiracy Beliefs.

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Michiel van Elk

Full Text Available Previous studies have shown that one's prior beliefs have a strong effect on perceptual decision-making and attentional processing. The present study extends these findings by investigating how individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are related to perceptual and attentional biases. Two field studies were conducted in which visitors of a paranormal conducted a perceptual decision making task (i.e. the face/house categorization task; Experiment 1 or a visual attention task (i.e. the global/local processing task; Experiment 2. In the first experiment it was found that skeptics compared to believers more often incorrectly categorized ambiguous face stimuli as representing a house, indicating that disbelief rather than belief in the paranormal is driving the bias observed for the categorization of ambiguous stimuli. In the second experiment, it was found that skeptics showed a classical 'global-to-local' interference effect, whereas believers in conspiracy theories were characterized by a stronger 'local-to-global interference effect'. The present study shows that individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are associated with perceptual and attentional biases, thereby extending the growing body of work in this field indicating effects of cultural learning on basic perceptual processes.

A queueing model of pilot decision making in a multi-task flight management situation

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Walden, R. S.; Rouse, W. B.

1977-01-01

Allocation of decision making responsibility between pilot and computer is considered and a flight management task, designed for the study of pilot-computer interaction, is discussed. A queueing theory model of pilot decision making in this multi-task, control and monitoring situation is presented. An experimental investigation of pilot decision making and the resulting model parameters are discussed.

Relation between Belief and Performance in Perceptual Decision Making

Science.gov (United States)

Drugowitsch, Jan; Moreno-Bote, Rubén; Pouget, Alexandre

2014-01-01

In an uncertain and ambiguous world, effective decision making requires that subjects form and maintain a belief about the correctness of their choices, a process called meta-cognition. Prediction of future outcomes and self-monitoring are only effective if belief closely matches behavioral performance. Equality between belief and performance is also critical for experimentalists to gain insight into the subjects' belief by simply measuring their performance. Assuming that the decision maker holds the correct model of the world, one might indeed expect that belief and performance should go hand in hand. Unfortunately, we show here that this is rarely the case when performance is defined as the percentage of correct responses for a fixed stimulus, a standard definition in psychophysics. In this case, belief equals performance only for a very narrow family of tasks, whereas in others they will only be very weakly correlated. As we will see it is possible to restore this equality in specific circumstances but this remedy is only effective for a decision-maker, not for an experimenter. We furthermore show that belief and performance do not match when conditioned on task difficulty – as is common practice when plotting the psychometric curve – highlighting common pitfalls in previous neuroscience work. Finally, we demonstrate that miscalibration and the hard-easy effect observed in humans' and other animals' certainty judgments could be explained by a mismatch between the experimenter's and decision maker's expected distribution of task difficulties. These results have important implications for experimental design and are of relevance for theories that aim to unravel the nature of meta-cognition. PMID:24816801

Affective biasing of choices in gambling task decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Hinson, John M; Whitney, Paul; Holben, Heather; Wirick, Aaron K

2006-09-01

The proponents of the somatic marker hypothesis presume that rational decision making is guided by emotional reactions that are developed from prior experience. Supporting evidence for the hypothesis comes almost exclusively from the short-term affective reactions that are learned during the course of a hypothetical decision-making task--the gambling task (GT). We examined GT performance and affective reactions to choices when those choices were biased by words that had preexisting affective value. In one experiment, affectively valued words directly signaled good and bad choices. A congruent relation between affective value of word and choice outcome improved GT performance, whereas an incongruent relation greatly interfered with performance. In another experiment, affectively valued words were maintained as a working memory (WM) load between GT choices. A WM load with affectively positive words somewhat improved GT performance, whereas affectively negative words interfered with performance. Somatic markers-indicated by differential anticipatory skin conductance response (SCR) amplitude for good and bad choices-appeared at a point in the GT session when choice performance was superior. However, differential SCR developed during the session after good choice performance was already established. These results indicate that preexisting affective biases can influence GT decision making. In addition, the somatic markers that are regular accompaniments of GT decision making appeared to be temporally lagging indicators of choice performance.

Prior expectations facilitate metacognition for perceptual decision.

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Sherman, M T; Seth, A K; Barrett, A B; Kanai, R

2015-09-01

The influential framework of 'predictive processing' suggests that prior probabilistic expectations influence, or even constitute, perceptual contents. This notion is evidenced by the facilitation of low-level perceptual processing by expectations. However, whether expectations can facilitate high-level components of perception remains unclear. We addressed this question by considering the influence of expectations on perceptual metacognition. To isolate the effects of expectation from those of attention we used a novel factorial design: expectation was manipulated by changing the probability that a Gabor target would be presented; attention was manipulated by instructing participants to perform or ignore a concurrent visual search task. We found that, independently of attention, metacognition improved when yes/no responses were congruent with expectations of target presence/absence. Results were modeled under a novel Bayesian signal detection theoretic framework which integrates bottom-up signal propagation with top-down influences, to provide a unified description of the mechanisms underlying perceptual decision and metacognition. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

What is on your mind? Using the perceptual cycle model and critical decision method to understand the decision-making process in the cockpit.

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Plant, Katherine L; Stanton, Neville A

2013-01-01

Aeronautical decision-making is complex as there is not always a clear coupling between the decision made and decision outcome. As such, there is a call for process-orientated decision research in order to understand why a decision made sense at the time it was made. Schema theory explains how we interact with the world using stored mental representations and forms an integral part of the perceptual cycle model (PCM); proposed here as a way to understand the decision-making process. This paper qualitatively analyses data from the critical decision method (CDM) based on the principles of the PCM. It is demonstrated that the approach can be used to understand a decision-making process and highlights how influential schemata can be at informing decision-making. The reliability of this approach is established, the general applicability is discussed and directions for future work are considered. This paper introduces the PCM, and the associated schema theory, as a framework to structure and explain data collected from the CDM. The reliability of both the method and coding scheme is addressed.

Neural Correlates of Decision Making on a Gambling Task

Science.gov (United States)

Carlson, Stephanie M.; Zayas, Vivian; Guthormsen, Amy

2009-01-01

Individual differences in affective decision making were examined by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) while 74 typically developing 8-year-olds (38 boys, 36 girls) completed a 4-choice gambling task (Hungry Donkey Task; E. A. Crone & M. W. van der Molen, 2004). ERP results indicated: (a) a robust P300 component in response to feedback…

Optimal decision making on the basis of evidence represented in spike trains.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Jiaxiang; Bogacz, Rafal

2010-05-01

Experimental data indicate that perceptual decision making involves integration of sensory evidence in certain cortical areas. Theoretical studies have proposed that the computation in neural decision circuits approximates statistically optimal decision procedures (e.g., sequential probability ratio test) that maximize the reward rate in sequential choice tasks. However, these previous studies assumed that the sensory evidence was represented by continuous values from gaussian distributions with the same variance across alternatives. In this article, we make a more realistic assumption that sensory evidence is represented in spike trains described by the Poisson processes, which naturally satisfy the mean-variance relationship observed in sensory neurons. We show that for such a representation, the neural circuits involving cortical integrators and basal ganglia can approximate the optimal decision procedures for two and multiple alternative choice tasks.

Failure to utilize feedback during explicit decision-making task in alcohol-dependent patients

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B N Roopesh

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Background: Patients who are diagnosed with alcohol-dependent syndrome (ADS are shown to have neuropsychological deficits, especially executive function (EF deficits. Among the EFs, decision-making is one such function which has consistently been shown to be impaired in people who are dependent on alcohol, compared to controls. Decision-making in this population is usually assessed with gambling-type tasks. However, some of these tasks are ambiguous, work on chance factors, rarely match with real-life gambling situations, and/or involve nonconscious mechanisms. Materials and Methods: The current study compared 26 male patients with ADS (P-ADS with equal number of their nonalcohol-dependent male siblings on sensation seeking and explicit gambling task (EGT. EGT is similar to the Iowa gambling task in administration, but varies from it as it involves a single outcome and provides unambiguous, explicit, and continuous feedback for the participants. Results and Conclusion: The results did not show any significant relationship between decision-making variables and sensation seeking. However, despite unambiguous, explicit, and continuous feedback, patients showed significantly poor decision-making as compared to the siblings of the P-ADS group. This study throws light on why people who are addicted to alcohol have difficulties in decision-making, despite knowing the adverse effects.

Perceptual decision neurosciences: a model-based review

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Mulder, M.J.; van Maanen, L.; Forstmann, B.U.

2014-01-01

In this review we summarize findings published over the past 10 years focusing on the neural correlates of perceptual decision-making. Importantly, this review highlights only studies that employ a model-based approach, i.e., they use quantitative cognitive models in combination with neuroscientific

Path Analysis Examining Self-Efficacy and Decision-Making Performance on a Simulated Baseball Task

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Hepler, Teri J.; Feltz, Deborah L.

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between decision-making self-efficacy and decision-making performance in sport. Undergraduate students (N = 78) performed 10 trials of a decision-making task in baseball. Self-efficacy was measured before performing each trial. Decision-making performance was assessed by decision speed and…

The Dilution Effect and Information Integration in Perceptual Decision Making.

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Hotaling, Jared M; Cohen, Andrew L; Shiffrin, Richard M; Busemeyer, Jerome R

2015-01-01

In cognitive science there is a seeming paradox: On the one hand, studies of human judgment and decision making have repeatedly shown that people systematically violate optimal behavior when integrating information from multiple sources. On the other hand, optimal models, often Bayesian, have been successful at accounting for information integration in fields such as categorization, memory, and perception. This apparent conflict could be due, in part, to different materials and designs that lead to differences in the nature of processing. Stimuli that require controlled integration of information, such as the quantitative or linguistic information (commonly found in judgment studies), may lead to suboptimal performance. In contrast, perceptual stimuli may lend themselves to automatic processing, resulting in integration that is closer to optimal. We tested this hypothesis with an experiment in which participants categorized faces based on resemblance to a family patriarch. The amount of evidence contained in the top and bottom halves of each test face was independently manipulated. These data allow us to investigate a canonical example of sub-optimal information integration from the judgment and decision making literature, the dilution effect. Splitting the top and bottom halves of a face, a manipulation meant to encourage controlled integration of information, produced farther from optimal behavior and larger dilution effects. The Multi-component Information Accumulation model, a hybrid optimal/averaging model of information integration, successfully accounts for key accuracy, response time, and dilution effects.

The Dilution Effect and Information Integration in Perceptual Decision Making.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jared M Hotaling

Full Text Available In cognitive science there is a seeming paradox: On the one hand, studies of human judgment and decision making have repeatedly shown that people systematically violate optimal behavior when integrating information from multiple sources. On the other hand, optimal models, often Bayesian, have been successful at accounting for information integration in fields such as categorization, memory, and perception. This apparent conflict could be due, in part, to different materials and designs that lead to differences in the nature of processing. Stimuli that require controlled integration of information, such as the quantitative or linguistic information (commonly found in judgment studies, may lead to suboptimal performance. In contrast, perceptual stimuli may lend themselves to automatic processing, resulting in integration that is closer to optimal. We tested this hypothesis with an experiment in which participants categorized faces based on resemblance to a family patriarch. The amount of evidence contained in the top and bottom halves of each test face was independently manipulated. These data allow us to investigate a canonical example of sub-optimal information integration from the judgment and decision making literature, the dilution effect. Splitting the top and bottom halves of a face, a manipulation meant to encourage controlled integration of information, produced farther from optimal behavior and larger dilution effects. The Multi-component Information Accumulation model, a hybrid optimal/averaging model of information integration, successfully accounts for key accuracy, response time, and dilution effects.

Error affect inoculation for a complex decision-making task.

Science.gov (United States)

Tabernero, Carmen; Wood, Robert E

2009-05-01

Individuals bring knowledge, implicit theories, and goal orientations to group meetings. Group decisions arise out of the exchange of these orientations. This research explores how a trainee's exploratory and deliberate process (an incremental theory and learning goal orientation) impacts the effectiveness of individual and group decision-making processes. The effectiveness of this training program is compared with another program that included error affect inoculation (EAI). Subjects were 40 Spanish Policemen in a training course. They were distributed in two training conditions for an individual and group decision-making task. In one condition, individuals received the Self-Guided Exploration plus Deliberation Process instructions, which emphasised exploring the options and testing hypotheses. In the other condition, individuals also received instructions based on Error Affect Inoculation (EAI), which emphasised positive affective reactions to errors and mistakes when making decisions. Results show that the quality of decisions increases when the groups share their reasoning. The AIE intervention promotes sharing information, flexible initial viewpoints, and improving the quality of group decisions. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Norm compliance affects perceptual decisions through modulation of a starting point bias.

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Toelch, Ulf; Panizza, Folco; Heekeren, Hauke R

2018-03-01

Adaptive decisions in social contexts depend on both perceptual information and social expectations or norms. These are potentially in conflict when certain choices are beneficial for an individual, but societal rules mandate a different course of action. To resolve such a conflict, the reliability of information has to be balanced against potentially deleterious effects of non-compliance such as ostracism. In this study, we systematically investigated how interactions between perceptual and social influences affect decision-relevant cognitive processes. In a direction-of-motion discrimination task, participants received perceptual information alongside information on other players' choices. In addition, we created conflict scenarios where players' choices affected other participants' monetary rewards dependent on whether their choices were in line or against the opinion of the other players. Importantly, we altered the strength of this manipulation in two separate experiments by contrasting motivations of either preventing harm or providing a benefit to others. Behavioural analyses and computational models of perceptual decisions showed that participants successfully integrated perceptual with social information. Participants' reliance on social information was effectively modulated in conflict situations. Critically, these effects were augmented when the strength of social norms was increased, indexing conditions under which social norms effectively influence decisions. These results inform theories of social influence by providing an account of how higher order goals like social norm compliance affect perceptual decisions.

Neural antecedents of social decision-making in a partner choice task.

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Cartmell, Samuel C D; Chun, Marvin M; Vickery, Timothy J

2014-11-01

Experiments in financial decision-making point to two complementary processes that encode prospective gain and loss preceding the choice to purchase consumer goods. These processes involve the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the right anterior insula, respectively. The current experiment used functional MRI to investigate whether these regions served a similar function during an analogous social decision-making task without the influence of monetary outcomes. In this task, subjects chose partners based on face stimuli of varying attractiveness (operationalizing value) and ratings of compatibility with the participant (operationalizing likelihood of rejection). The NAcc responded to anticipated gain; the right anterior insula responded to compatibility, but not in a manner that suggests an analogy to anticipated cost. Logistic regression modeling demonstrated that both regions predicted subsequent choice above and beyond the influence of group attractiveness ratings or compatibility alone. Although the function of the insula may differ between tasks, these results suggest that financial and social decision-making recruit a similar network of brain regions. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Optimal policy for value-based decision-making.

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Tajima, Satohiro; Drugowitsch, Jan; Pouget, Alexandre

2016-08-18

For decades now, normative theories of perceptual decisions, and their implementation as drift diffusion models, have driven and significantly improved our understanding of human and animal behaviour and the underlying neural processes. While similar processes seem to govern value-based decisions, we still lack the theoretical understanding of why this ought to be the case. Here, we show that, similar to perceptual decisions, drift diffusion models implement the optimal strategy for value-based decisions. Such optimal decisions require the models' decision boundaries to collapse over time, and to depend on the a priori knowledge about reward contingencies. Diffusion models only implement the optimal strategy under specific task assumptions, and cease to be optimal once we start relaxing these assumptions, by, for example, using non-linear utility functions. Our findings thus provide the much-needed theory for value-based decisions, explain the apparent similarity to perceptual decisions, and predict conditions under which this similarity should break down.

Visual anticipation biases conscious decision making but not bottom-up visual processing.

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Mathews, Zenon; Cetnarski, Ryszard; Verschure, Paul F M J

2014-01-01

Prediction plays a key role in control of attention but it is not clear which aspects of prediction are most prominent in conscious experience. An evolving view on the brain is that it can be seen as a prediction machine that optimizes its ability to predict states of the world and the self through the top-down propagation of predictions and the bottom-up presentation of prediction errors. There are competing views though on whether prediction or prediction errors dominate the formation of conscious experience. Yet, the dynamic effects of prediction on perception, decision making and consciousness have been difficult to assess and to model. We propose a novel mathematical framework and a psychophysical paradigm that allows us to assess both the hierarchical structuring of perceptual consciousness, its content and the impact of predictions and/or errors on conscious experience, attention and decision-making. Using a displacement detection task combined with reverse correlation, we reveal signatures of the usage of prediction at three different levels of perceptual processing: bottom-up fast saccades, top-down driven slow saccades and consciousnes decisions. Our results suggest that the brain employs multiple parallel mechanism at different levels of perceptual processing in order to shape effective sensory consciousness within a predicted perceptual scene. We further observe that bottom-up sensory and top-down predictive processes can be dissociated through cognitive load. We propose a probabilistic data association model from dynamical systems theory to model the predictive multi-scale bias in perceptual processing that we observe and its role in the formation of conscious experience. We propose that these results support the hypothesis that consciousness provides a time-delayed description of a task that is used to prospectively optimize real time control structures, rather than being engaged in the real-time control of behavior itself.

Quantitative prediction of perceptual decisions during near-threshold fear detection

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Pessoa, Luiz; Padmala, Srikanth

2005-04-01

A fundamental goal of cognitive neuroscience is to explain how mental decisions originate from basic neural mechanisms. The goal of the present study was to investigate the neural correlates of perceptual decisions in the context of emotional perception. To probe this question, we investigated how fluctuations in functional MRI (fMRI) signals were correlated with behavioral choice during a near-threshold fear detection task. fMRI signals predicted behavioral choice independently of stimulus properties and task accuracy in a network of brain regions linked to emotional processing: posterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, right inferior frontal gyrus, and left insula. We quantified the link between fMRI signals and behavioral choice in a whole-brain analysis by determining choice probabilities by means of signal-detection theory methods. Our results demonstrate that voxel-wise fMRI signals can reliably predict behavioral choice in a quantitative fashion (choice probabilities ranged from 0.63 to 0.78) at levels comparable to neuronal data. We suggest that the conscious decision that a fearful face has been seen is represented across a network of interconnected brain regions that prepare the organism to appropriately handle emotionally challenging stimuli and that regulate the associated emotional response. decision making | emotion | functional MRI

Decision-making impairment in obsessive-compulsive disorder as measured by the Iowa Gambling Task

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Felipe Filardi da Rocha

2011-08-01

Full Text Available OBJECTIVE: This study aims to evaluate the process of decision-making in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT. In addition, we intend to expand the understanding of clinical and demographic characteristics that influence decision-making. METHOD: Our sample consisted of 214 subjects (107 diagnosed with OCD and 107 healthy controls who were evaluated on their clinical, demographic and neuropsychological features. Moreover, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT, a task that detects and measures decision-making impairments, was used. RESULTS: We found that OCD patients performed significantly worse on the IGT. Furthermore, features such as symptoms of anxiety did not influence IGT performance. CONCLUSION: Impaired decision-making seems to be a key feature of OCD. Given that OCD is a complex heterogeneous disorder, homogeneous groups are necessary for an accurate characterization of our findings.

Categorization = Decision Making + Generalization

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Seger, Carol A; Peterson, Erik J.

2013-01-01

We rarely, if ever, repeatedly encounter exactly the same situation. This makes generalization crucial for real world decision making. We argue that categorization, the study of generalizable representations, is a type of decision making, and that categorization learning research would benefit from approaches developed to study the neuroscience of decision making. Similarly, methods developed to examine generalization and learning within the field of categorization may enhance decision making research. We first discuss perceptual information processing and integration, with an emphasis on accumulator models. We then examine learning the value of different decision making choices via experience, emphasizing reinforcement learning modeling approaches. Next we discuss how value is combined with other factors in decision making, emphasizing the effects of uncertainty. Finally, we describe how a final decision is selected via thresholding processes implemented by the basal ganglia and related regions. We also consider how memory related functions in the hippocampus may be integrated with decision making mechanisms and contribute to categorization. PMID:23548891

Doubly Bayesian Analysis of Confidence in Perceptual Decision-Making.

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Aitchison, Laurence; Bang, Dan; Bahrami, Bahador; Latham, Peter E

2015-10-01

Humans stand out from other animals in that they are able to explicitly report on the reliability of their internal operations. This ability, which is known as metacognition, is typically studied by asking people to report their confidence in the correctness of some decision. However, the computations underlying confidence reports remain unclear. In this paper, we present a fully Bayesian method for directly comparing models of confidence. Using a visual two-interval forced-choice task, we tested whether confidence reports reflect heuristic computations (e.g. the magnitude of sensory data) or Bayes optimal ones (i.e. how likely a decision is to be correct given the sensory data). In a standard design in which subjects were first asked to make a decision, and only then gave their confidence, subjects were mostly Bayes optimal. In contrast, in a less-commonly used design in which subjects indicated their confidence and decision simultaneously, they were roughly equally likely to use the Bayes optimal strategy or to use a heuristic but suboptimal strategy. Our results suggest that, while people's confidence reports can reflect Bayes optimal computations, even a small unusual twist or additional element of complexity can prevent optimality.

Dynamic integration of reward and stimulus information in perceptual decision-making.

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Gao, Juan; Tortell, Rebecca; McClelland, James L

2011-03-03

In perceptual decision-making, ideal decision-makers should bias their choices toward alternatives associated with larger rewards, and the extent of the bias should decrease as stimulus sensitivity increases. When responses must be made at different times after stimulus onset, stimulus sensitivity grows with time from zero to a final asymptotic level. Are decision makers able to produce responses that are more biased if they are made soon after stimulus onset, but less biased if they are made after more evidence has been accumulated? If so, how close to optimal can they come in doing this, and how might their performance be achieved mechanistically? We report an experiment in which the payoff for each alternative is indicated before stimulus onset. Processing time is controlled by a "go" cue occurring at different times post stimulus onset, requiring a response within msec. Reward bias does start high when processing time is short and decreases as sensitivity increases, leveling off at a non-zero value. However, the degree of bias is sub-optimal for shorter processing times. We present a mechanistic account of participants' performance within the framework of the leaky competing accumulator model [1], in which accumulators for each alternative accumulate noisy information subject to leakage and mutual inhibition. The leveling off of accuracy is attributed to mutual inhibition between the accumulators, allowing the accumulator that gathers the most evidence early in a trial to suppress the alternative. Three ways reward might affect decision making in this framework are considered. One of the three, in which reward affects the starting point of the evidence accumulation process, is consistent with the qualitative pattern of the observed reward bias effect, while the other two are not. Incorporating this assumption into the leaky competing accumulator model, we are able to provide close quantitative fits to individual participant data.

The process of processing: exploring the validity of Neisser's perceptual cycle model with accounts from critical decision-making in the cockpit.

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Plant, Katherine L; Stanton, Neville A

2015-01-01

The perceptual cycle model (PCM) has been widely applied in ergonomics research in domains including road, rail and aviation. The PCM assumes that information processing occurs in a cyclical manner drawing on top-down and bottom-up influences to produce perceptual exploration and actions. However, the validity of the model has not been addressed. This paper explores the construct validity of the PCM in the context of aeronautical decision-making. The critical decision method was used to interview 20 helicopter pilots about critical decision-making. The data were qualitatively analysed using an established coding scheme, and composite PCMs for incident phases were constructed. It was found that the PCM provided a mutually exclusive and exhaustive classification of the information-processing cycles for dealing with critical incidents. However, a counter-cycle was also discovered which has been attributed to skill-based behaviour, characteristic of experts. The practical applications and future research questions are discussed. Practitioner Summary: This paper explores whether information processing, when dealing with critical incidents, occurs in the manner anticipated by the perceptual cycle model. In addition to the traditional processing cycle, a reciprocal counter-cycle was found. This research can be utilised by those who use the model as an accident analysis framework.

Strategy selection in cue-based decision making.

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Bryant, David J

2014-06-01

People can make use of a range of heuristic and rational, compensatory strategies to perform a multiple-cue judgment task. It has been proposed that people are sensitive to the amount of cognitive effort required to employ decision strategies. Experiment 1 employed a dual-task methodology to investigate whether participants' preference for heuristic versus compensatory decision strategies can be altered by increasing the cognitive demands of the task. As indicated by participants' decision times, a secondary task interfered more with the performance of a heuristic than compensatory decision strategy but did not affect the proportions of participants using either type of strategy. A stimulus set effect suggested that the conjunction of cue salience and cue validity might play a determining role in strategy selection. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that when a perceptually salient cue was also the most valid, the majority of participants preferred a single-cue heuristic strategy. Overall, the results contradict the view that heuristics are more likely to be adopted when a task is made more cognitively demanding. It is argued that people employ 2 learning processes during training, one an associative learning process in which cue-outcome associations are developed by sampling multiple cues, and another that involves the sequential examination of single cues to serve as a basis for a single-cue heuristic.

Integrated approaches to perceptual learning.

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Jacobs, Robert A

2010-04-01

New technologies and new ways of thinking have recently led to rapid expansions in the study of perceptual learning. We describe three themes shared by many of the nine articles included in this topic on Integrated Approaches to Perceptual Learning. First, perceptual learning cannot be studied on its own because it is closely linked to other aspects of cognition, such as attention, working memory, decision making, and conceptual knowledge. Second, perceptual learning is sensitive to both the stimulus properties of the environment in which an observer exists and to the properties of the tasks that the observer needs to perform. Moreover, the environmental and task properties can be characterized through their statistical regularities. Finally, the study of perceptual learning has important implications for society, including implications for science education and medical rehabilitation. Contributed articles relevant to each theme are summarized. Copyright © 2010 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Lexical Complexity of Decision-Making Writing Tasks: Form-focused Guided Strategic Planning

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Fatemeh Mahdavirad

2016-06-01

Full Text Available The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of form-focused guided strategic planning on lexical complexity of learners’ performance in writing tasks. The twenty intermediate level participants of the study performed an unplanned and then a planned decision-making task. In the planned task condition, the participants were provided with form-focused guided strategic planning which contained detailed instructions about how to plan, by being instructed to focus on form. The guidance included an explanation of the necessary structural and lexical patterns employed to express the learners’ views while developing a comparison-and-contrast paragraph in each task. The results of the statistical analysis indicated that the participants produced a written product with a greater lexical complexity in their performance of the task in the form-focused strategic planning condition. The findings emphasize the importance of guided strategic planning as a task condition in syllabus design for task-based language teaching and the necessity of incorporating this task feature for accomplishing lexical complexity in decision-making writing tasks.

Characterization of children's decision making: sensitivity to punishment frequency, not task complexity.

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Crone, Eveline A; Bunge, Silvia A; Latenstein, Heleen; van der Molen, Maurits W

2005-06-01

On a gambling task that models real-life decision making, children between ages 7 and 12 perform like patients with bilateral lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), opting for choices that yield high immediate gains in spite of higher future losses (Crone & Van der Molen, 2004). The current study set out to characterize developmental changes in decision making by varying task complexity and punishment frequency. Three age groups (7-9 years, 10-12 years, 13-15 years) performed two versions of a computerized variant of the original Iowa gambling task. Task complexity was manipulated by varying the number of choices participants could make. Punishment frequency was manipulated by varying the frequency of delayed punishment. Results showed a developmental increase in the sensitivity to future consequences, which was present only when the punishment was presented infrequently. These results could not be explained by differential sensitivity to task complexity, hypersensitivity to reward, or failure to switch response set after receiving punishment. There was a general pattern of boys outperforming girls by making more advantageous choices over the course of the task. In conclusion, 7-12-year-old children--like VMPFC patients--appear myopic about the future except when the potential for future punishment is high.

Better decision making in complex, dynamic tasks training with human-facilitated interactive learning environments

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Qudrat-Ullah, Hassan

2015-01-01

This book describes interactive learning environments (ILEs) and their underlying concepts. It explains how ILEs can be used to improve the decision-making process and how these improvements can be empirically verified. The objective of this book is to enhance our understanding of and to gain insights into the process by which human facilitated ILEs are effectively designed and used in improving users’ decision making in complex, dynamic tasks. This book is divided into four major parts. Part I serves as an introduction to the importance and complexity of decision making in dynamic tasks. Part II provides background material, drawing upon relevant literature, for the development of an integrated process model on the effectiveness of human facilitated ILEs in improving decision making in dynamic tasks. Part III focuses on the design, development, and application of FishBankILE in laboratory experiments to gather empirical evidence for the validity of the process model. Finally, part IV presents a comprehensi...

Decision-making and emotions in the contested information environment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M.W. Haas

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Future conflicts will necessitate the ability to conduct effective military operations in a contested information environment. The building and maintaining of robust situational awareness, protection of decision-making effectiveness of individuals and teams, fighting through information attacks from both in, and through, the cyberspace domain, will be essential. Increasing the knowledge of the mechanisms involved in degrading task performance and decision-making during cyber attacks will enable the development of advanced human-centered defensive techniques that aid fight-through capability. In this position paper, the development and evaluation of software that simulates real-time and persistent manipulation of the information environment is discussed. Results of the evaluation indicated that the task performance of a team of decision-makers performing collaborative tasks could be degraded through real-time manipulation of cyberspace content and operation. The paper concludes with a discussion of focus and direction for future research and development. It is suggested that the building of a deeper understanding of the perceptual and cognitive factors that are significant in the relationship between information environment manipulation and reduction in task performance is required. This understanding will aid in the defence of cyberspace attacks, will aid in fight through and mission assurance, and will aid the Information Operations community.

Chronic motivational state interacts with task reward structure in dynamic decision-making.

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Cooper, Jessica A; Worthy, Darrell A; Maddox, W Todd

2015-12-01

Research distinguishes between a habitual, model-free system motivated toward immediately rewarding actions, and a goal-directed, model-based system motivated toward actions that improve future state. We examined the balance of processing in these two systems during state-based decision-making. We tested a regulatory fit hypothesis (Maddox & Markman, 2010) that predicts that global trait motivation affects the balance of habitual- vs. goal-directed processing but only through its interaction with the task framing as gain-maximization or loss-minimization. We found support for the hypothesis that a match between an individual's chronic motivational state and the task framing enhances goal-directed processing, and thus state-based decision-making. Specifically, chronic promotion-focused individuals under gain-maximization and chronic prevention-focused individuals under loss-minimization both showed enhanced state-based decision-making. Computational modeling indicates that individuals in a match between global chronic motivational state and local task reward structure engaged more goal-directed processing, whereas those in a mismatch engaged more habitual processing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The influence of cueing on attentional focus in perceptual decision making.

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Yang, Cheng-Ta; Little, Daniel R; Hsu, Ching-Chun

2014-11-01

Selective attention has been known to play an important role in decision making. In the present study, we combined a cueing paradigm with a redundant-target detection task to examine how attention affects the decision process when detecting the redundant targets. Cue validity was manipulated in two experiments. The results showed that when the cue was 50 % valid in one experiment, the participants adopted a parallel self-terminating processing strategy, indicative of a diffuse attentional focus on both target locations. When the cue was 100 % valid in the second experiment, all of the participants switched to a serial self-terminating processing strategy, which in our study indicated focused attention to a single target location. This study demonstrates the flexibility of the decision mechanism and highlights the importance of top-down control in selecting a decision strategy.

Does Core Task Matter for Decision-Making? A Comparative Case Study on Whether Differences in Job Characteristics Affect Discretionary Street-Level Decision-Making

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jensen, Didde Cramer

2017-01-01

This article sets out to test the hypothesis that differences in fundamental job characteristics (service vs. regulation) affect discretionary street-level decision-making. The hypothesis was tested by examining whether systematic variation could be found in the moral assessments on which street......-level bureaucrats performing different types of core tasks base their decisions. The issue was addressed in a comparative case study comprising three institutions, which differ systematically as far as variables of tasks are concerned. Findings showed that differences in core tasks do affect discretionary decision...

Identifying the processes underpinning anticipation and decision-making in a dynamic time-constrained task.

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Roca, André; Ford, Paul R; McRobert, Allistair P; Mark Williams, A

2011-08-01

A novel, representative task was used to examine skill-based differences in the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying performance on a dynamic, externally paced task. Skilled and less skilled soccer players were required to move and interact with life-size, action sequences involving 11 versus 11 soccer situations filmed from the perspective of a central defender in soccer. The ability of participants to anticipate the intentions of their opponents and to make decisions about how they should respond was measured across two separate experiments. In Experiment 1, visual search behaviors were examined using an eye-movement registration system. In Experiment 2, retrospective verbal reports of thinking were gathered from a new sample of skilled and less skilled participants. Skilled participants were more accurate than less skilled participants at anticipating the intentions of opponents and in deciding on an appropriate course of action. The skilled players employed a search strategy involving more fixations of shorter duration in a different sequential order and toward more disparate and informative locations in the display when compared with the less skilled counterparts. The skilled players generated a greater number of verbal report statements with a higher proportion of evaluation, prediction, and planning statements than the less skilled players, suggesting they employed more complex domain-specific memory representations to solve the task. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.

Associative priming in a masked perceptual identification task: evidence for automatic processes.

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Pecher, Diane; Zeelenberg, René; Raaijmakers, Jeroen G W

2002-10-01

Two experiments investigated the influence of automatic and strategic processes on associative priming effects in a perceptual identification task in which prime-target pairs are briefly presented and masked. In this paradigm, priming is defined as a higher percentage of correctly identified targets for related pairs than for unrelated pairs. In Experiment 1, priming was obtained for mediated word pairs. This mediated priming effect was affected neither by the presence of direct associations nor by the presentation time of the primes, indicating that automatic priming effects play a role in perceptual identification. Experiment 2 showed that the priming effect was not affected by the proportion (.90 vs. .10) of related pairs if primes were presented briefly to prevent their identification. However, a large proportion effect was found when primes were presented for 1000 ms so that they were clearly visible. These results indicate that priming in a masked perceptual identification task is the result of automatic processes and is not affected by strategies. The present paradigm provides a valuable alternative to more commonly used tasks such as lexical decision.

Perceptual grouping does not affect multi-attribute decision making if no processing costs are involved.

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Ettlin, Florence; Bröder, Arndt

2015-05-01

Adaptive strategy selection implies that a decision strategy is chosen based on its fit to the task and situation. However, other aspects, such as the way information is presented, can determine information search behavior; especially when the application of certain strategies over others is facilitated. But are such display effects on multi-attribute decisions also at work when the manipulation does not entail differential costs for different decision strategies? Three Mouselab experiments with hidden information and one eye tracking experiment with an open information board revealed that decision behavior is unaffected by purely perceptual manipulations of the display based on Gestalt principles; that is, based on manipulations that induce no noteworthy processing costs for different information search patterns. We discuss our results in the context of previous findings on display effects; specifically, how the combination of these findings and our results reveal the crucial role of differential processing costs for different strategies for the emergence of display effects. This finding describes a boundary condition of the commonly acknowledged influence of information displays and is in line with the ideas of adaptive strategy selection and cost-benefit tradeoffs. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Cerebellar tDCS dissociates the timing of perceptual decisions from perceptual change in speech

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Lametti, D.R.; Oostwoud Wijdenes, L.; Bonaiuto, J.; Bestmann, S.; Rothwell, J.C.

2016-01-01

Neuroimaging studies suggest that the cerebellum might play a role in both speech perception and speech perceptual learning. However, it remains unclear what this role is: does the cerebellum directly contribute to the perceptual decision? Or does it contribute to the timing of perceptual decisions?

Examination of the effects of cannabinoid ligands on decision making in a rat gambling task.

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Ferland, Jacqueline-Marie N; Carr, Madison R; Lee, Angela M; Hoogeland, Myrthe E; Winstanley, Catharine A; Pattij, Tommy

2018-07-01

Although exposure to delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is perceived to be relatively harmless, mounting evidence has begun to show that it is associated with a variety of cognitive deficits, including poor decision making. THC-induced impairments in decision making are thought to be the result of cannabinoid CB1 receptor activation, and although clinical literature suggests that chronic activation via THC contributes to perturbations in decision making, acute CB1 receptor modulation has yielded mixed results. Using an animal model to examine how CB1-specific ligands impact choice biases would provide significant insight as to how recruitment of the endocannabinoid system may influence decision making. Here, we used the rat gambling task (rGT), a validated analogue of the human Iowa Gambling Task, to assess baseline decision making preferences in male Wistar rats. After acquisition rGT performance was measured. Animals were challenged with the CB1 receptor antagonist rimonabant, the partial agonist THC, and the synthetic agonist WIN55,212-2. Animals were also treated acutely with the fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) inhibitor URB597 to selectively upregulate the endocannabinoid anandamide. Blockade of the CB1 receptor produced a trend improvement in decision making in animals who preferred the advantageous task options, yet left choice unaffected in risk-prone rats. Neither CB1 receptor agonist had strong effects on decision making, but a high dose THC decreased premature responses, whereas WIN55,212-2 did the opposite. URB597 did not affect task performance. These results indicate that although chronic CB1 receptor activation may be associated with impaired decision making, acute modulation has modest effects on choice and instead may play a substantive role in regulating impulsive responding. Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Understanding decision making about balancing two stocks: the faculty gender balancing task

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Bleijenbergh, I.L.; Vennix, J.A.M.; Jacobs, H.A.G.M.; Engen, M.L. van; Engen, M. van

2016-01-01

This paper contributes to the understanding of dynamic decision making. Using the faculty gender balancing task, we experimentally test the extent to which participants correctly estimate the inflow needed to balance two unbalanced stocks and how they substantiate their decision. The results show

Studying the effect of perceptual errors on the decisions made by the ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The factors that the investors are not aware of their effectiveness and make investment decisions. The main purpose of the present research is to study the perceptual factors affecting on the decision making process of the investors and the effect of information on these factors. For this aim, 385 investors of Tehran Stock ...

Automatic Priming Effects for New Associations in Lexical Decision and Perceptual Identification

NARCIS (Netherlands)

D. Pecher (Diane); J.G.W. Raaijmakers (Jeroen)

1999-01-01

textabstractInformation storage in semantic memory was investigated by looking at automatic priming effects for new associations in two experiments. In the study phase word pairs were presented in a paired-associate learning task. Lexical decision and perceptual identification were used to examine

Brain mechanisms for perceptual and reward-related decision-making.

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Deco, Gustavo; Rolls, Edmund T; Albantakis, Larissa; Romo, Ranulfo

2013-04-01

Phenomenological models of decision-making, including the drift-diffusion and race models, are compared with mechanistic, biologically plausible models, such as integrate-and-fire attractor neuronal network models. The attractor network models show how decision confidence is an emergent property; and make testable predictions about the neural processes (including neuronal activity and fMRI signals) involved in decision-making which indicate that the medial prefrontal cortex is involved in reward value-based decision-making. Synaptic facilitation in these models can help to account for sequential vibrotactile decision-making, and for how postponed decision-related responses are made. The randomness in the neuronal spiking-related noise that makes the decision-making probabilistic is shown to be increased by the graded firing rate representations found in the brain, to be decreased by the diluted connectivity, and still to be significant in biologically large networks with thousands of synapses onto each neuron. The stability of these systems is shown to be influenced in different ways by glutamatergic and GABAergic efficacy, leading to a new field of dynamical neuropsychiatry with applications to understanding schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The noise in these systems is shown to be advantageous, and to apply to similar attractor networks involved in short-term memory, long-term memory, attention, and associative thought processes. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Equality bias impairs collective decision-making across cultures.

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Mahmoodi, Ali; Bang, Dan; Olsen, Karsten; Zhao, Yuanyuan Aimee; Shi, Zhenhao; Broberg, Kristina; Safavi, Shervin; Han, Shihui; Nili Ahmadabadi, Majid; Frith, Chris D; Roepstorff, Andreas; Rees, Geraint; Bahrami, Bahador

2015-03-24

We tend to think that everyone deserves an equal say in a debate. This seemingly innocuous assumption can be damaging when we make decisions together as part of a group. To make optimal decisions, group members should weight their differing opinions according to how competent they are relative to one another; whenever they differ in competence, an equal weighting is suboptimal. Here, we asked how people deal with individual differences in competence in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task. We developed a metric for estimating how participants weight their partner's opinion relative to their own and compared this weighting to an optimal benchmark. Replicated across three countries (Denmark, Iran, and China), we show that participants assigned nearly equal weights to each other's opinions regardless of true differences in their competence-even when informed by explicit feedback about their competence gap or under monetary incentives to maximize collective accuracy. This equality bias, whereby people behave as if they are as good or as bad as their partner, is particularly costly for a group when a competence gap separates its members.

Decision making from economic and signal detection perspectives: development of an integrated framework

Science.gov (United States)

Lynn, Spencer K.; Wormwood, Jolie B.; Barrett, Lisa F.; Quigley, Karen S.

2015-01-01

Behavior is comprised of decisions made from moment to moment (i.e., to respond one way or another). Often, the decision maker cannot be certain of the value to be accrued from the decision (i.e., the outcome value). Decisions made under outcome value uncertainty form the basis of the economic framework of decision making. Behavior is also based on perception—perception of the external physical world and of the internal bodily milieu, which both provide cues that guide decision making. These perceptual signals are also often uncertain: another person's scowling facial expression may indicate threat or intense concentration, alternatives that require different responses from the perceiver. Decisions made under perceptual uncertainty form the basis of the signals framework of decision making. Traditional behavioral economic approaches to decision making focus on the uncertainty that comes from variability in possible outcome values, and typically ignore the influence of perceptual uncertainty. Conversely, traditional signal detection approaches to decision making focus on the uncertainty that arises from variability in perceptual signals and typically ignore the influence of outcome value uncertainty. Here, we compare and contrast the economic and signals frameworks that guide research in decision making, with the aim of promoting their integration. We show that an integrated framework can expand our ability to understand a wider variety of decision-making behaviors, in particular the complexly determined real-world decisions we all make every day. PMID:26217275

An integrated theory of attention and decision making in visual signal detection.

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Smith, Philip L; Ratcliff, Roger

2009-04-01

The simplest attentional task, detecting a cued stimulus in an otherwise empty visual field, produces complex patterns of performance. Attentional cues interact with backward masks and with spatial uncertainty, and there is a dissociation in the effects of these variables on accuracy and on response time. A computational theory of performance in this task is described. The theory links visual encoding, masking, spatial attention, visual short-term memory (VSTM), and perceptual decision making in an integrated dynamic framework. The theory assumes that decisions are made by a diffusion process driven by a neurally plausible, shunting VSTM. The VSTM trace encodes the transient outputs of early visual filters in a durable form that is preserved for the time needed to make a decision. Attention increases the efficiency of VSTM encoding, either by increasing the rate of trace formation or by reducing the delay before trace formation begins. The theory provides a detailed, quantitative account of attentional effects in spatial cuing tasks at the level of response accuracy and the response time distributions. (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved

Long-term heavy marijuana users make costly decisions on a gambling task.

Science.gov (United States)

Whitlow, Christopher T; Liguori, Anthony; Livengood, L Brooke; Hart, Stephanie L; Mussat-Whitlow, Becky J; Lamborn, Corey M; Laurienti, Paul J; Porrino, Linda J

2004-10-05

Chronic marijuana use has been associated with impairments of learning, memory, and executive functions. Little is known, however, about the effects of marijuana use on other cognitive domains, such as decision-making, which are thought to play an important role in addiction and drug abuse. The purpose of the present study was to determine if long-term heavy marijuana users employ different decision-making strategies than individuals with minimal marijuana exposure. Volunteers were assigned to a cannabis (n = 10) or control group (n = 10) based upon history of prior marijuana use. Demographic and neuropsychological variables were evaluated, and a decision-making task--the gambling task (GT) was administered. Although few demographic and neuropsychological differences were noted between groups, marijuana users made more decisions that led to larger immediate gains despite more costly losses than controls. These data suggest that long-term heavy marijuana users may have specific deficits in the ability to balance rewards and punishments that may contribute to continued drug-taking behavior. It is unknown, however, whether the basis for such deficits might be attributed directly to marijuana exposure or pre-existing genetic or behavioral differences.

Gunslingers, poker players, and chickens 3: Decision making under mental performance pressure in junior elite athletes.

Science.gov (United States)

Parkin, Beth L; Walsh, Vincent

2017-01-01

Task (CGT; Rogers et al., 1999), decision making under uncertainty via the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002), and fast reactive responses to perceptual stimuli via the Visual Search Task (Treisman, 1982). Mental pressure was induced with the addition of a concurrent verbal memory task, used to increase cognitive load and mimic the distracting effects of anxiety-related rumination. In junior elite athletes, fast reactive responses to perceptual stimuli (on the Visual Search Task) were slower under conditions of mental pressure. For decision making under risk there was an interaction of mental pressure and gender on the amount of points gambled, under pressure there was a higher level of risk taking in male athletes compared to females. There was no influence of mental pressure on decision making under uncertainity. There were no significant correlations in the degree to which individual's responses changed under pressure across the three measures of decision making. When assessing the applicability of results based on group averages there were no junior elite athletes who showed an "average" response (within 1SD of the mean) to mental pressure across all the three decision-making tasks. Mental pressure affects decision making in a sample of junior elite athletes, with a slowing of response times, and modulations to performance of decision making under risk that have a high requirement for working memory. In relation to sport, these findings suggest that novel situations that place high cognitive demands on the athlete may be particularly influenced by mental pressure. The application of this work in junior elite athletes included the feedback of individual results and the implementation of a decision-making taxonomy. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Discriminating talent-identified junior Australian football players using a video decision-making task.

Science.gov (United States)

Woods, Carl T; Raynor, Annette J; Bruce, Lyndell; McDonald, Zane

2016-01-01

This study examined if a video decision-making task could discriminate talent-identified junior Australian football players from their non-talent-identified counterparts. Participants were recruited from the 2013 under 18 (U18) West Australian Football League competition and classified into two groups: talent-identified (State U18 Academy representatives; n = 25; 17.8 ± 0.5 years) and non-talent-identified (non-State U18 Academy selection; n = 25; 17.3 ± 0.6 years). Participants completed a video decision-making task consisting of 26 clips sourced from the Australian Football League game-day footage, recording responses on a sheet provided. A score of "1" was given for correct and "0" for incorrect responses, with the participants total score used as the criterion value. One-way analysis of variance tested the main effect of "status" on the task criterion, whilst a bootstrapped receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve assessed the discriminant ability of the task. An area under the curve (AUC) of 1 (100%) represented perfect discrimination. Between-group differences were evident (P talent-identified and non-talent-identified participants, respectively. Future research should investigate the mechanisms leading to the superior decision-making observed in the talent-identified group.

Influence of biases in numerical magnitude allocation on human prosocial decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Arshad, Qadeer; Nigmatullina, Yuliya; Siddiqui, Shuaib; Franka, Mustafa; Mediratta, Saniya; Ramachandaran, Sanjeev; Lobo, Rhannon; Malhotra, Paresh A; Roberts, R E; Bronstein, Adolfo M

2017-12-01

can directly predict the amount of money donated by an individual to an anonymous stranger during the dictator game. Furthermore, subliminally inducing perceptual biases in numerical-magnitude allocation can actively drive prosocial choices in the corresponding direction. Our findings provide evidence for numerical influences on decision making during performance of the dictator game. Accordingly, without the implementation of an adequate control for numerical influences, the dictator game and other tasks with an inherent numerical component (i.e., ultimatum game) should be employed with caution in the assessment of human behavior. Copyright © 2017 the American Physiological Society.

Al Hirschfeld's NINA as a prototype search task for studying perceptual error in radiology

Science.gov (United States)

Nodine, Calvin F.; Kundel, Harold L.

1997-04-01

Artist Al Hirschfeld has been hiding the word NINA (his daughter's name) in line drawings of theatrical scenes that have appeared in the New York Times for over 50 years. This paper shows how Hirschfeld's search task of finding the name NINA in his drawings illustrates basic perceptual principles of detection, discrimination and decision-making commonly encountered in radiology search tasks. Hirschfeld's hiding of NINA is typically accomplished by camouflaging the letters of the name and blending them into scenic background details such as wisps of hair and folds of clothing. In a similar way, pulmonary nodules and breast lesions are camouflaged by anatomic features of the chest or breast image. Hirschfeld's hidden NINAs are sometimes missed because they are integrated into a Gestalt overview rather than differentiated from background features during focal scanning. This may be similar to overlooking an obvious nodule behind the heart in a chest x-ray image. Because it is a search game, Hirschfeld assigns a number to each drawing to indicate how many NINAs he has hidden so as not to frustrate his viewers. In the radiologists' task, the number of targets detected in a medical image is determined by combining perceptual input with probabilities generated from clinical history and viewing experience. Thus, in the absence of truth, searching for abnormalities in x-ray images creates opportunities for recognition and decision errors (e.g. false positives and false negatives). We illustrate how camouflage decreases the conspicuity of both artistic and radiographic targets, compare detection performance of radiologists with lay persons searching for NINAs, and, show similarities and differences between scanning strategies of the two groups based on eye-position data.

Apathy symptoms modulate motivational decision making on the Iowa gambling task

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Njomboro Progress

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The present study represents an initial attempt to assess the role of apathy in motivated decision making on the Iowa Gambling Task. Clinical descriptions of patients with apathy highlight deficits in the cognitive, emotional and behavioural aspects of goal directed activity, yet standard neurocognitive tests of these measures fail to demonstrate reliable sensitivity to the disorder. Available research suggests the Iowa Gambling Task is a robust test of complex emotional socio-executive processes involved in motivational decision making, which can analogue real-world goal-directed behaviour. Methods We ask whether performance on the Iowa Gambling Task can distinguish brain damaged patients with apathy symptoms from 1 brain damaged patients without apathy and 2 neurologically intact controls. Overall, 22 healthy adults and 29 brain damaged patients took part in this study. Results Brain damaged patients with apathy were distinctively impaired on the Iowa Gambling Task compared to both non-apathetic brain damaged patients and neurologically intact healthy controls. On the other hand, standard measures for the cognitive control of behaviour failed to show this sensitivity. Conclusions Our results demonstrated that the Iowa Gambling Task is sensitive to the presence of apathy symptoms. We discuss these findings in terms of neurocognition deficits in apathy and the related implications for rehabilitation and clinical intervention.

Framing of task performance strategies: effects on performance in a multiattribute dynamic decision making environment.

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Nygren, T E

1997-09-01

It is well documented that the way a static choice task is "framed" can dramatically alter choice behavior, often leading to observable preference reversals. This framing effect appears to result from perceived changes in the nature or location of a person's initial reference point, but it is not clear how framing effects might generalize to performance on dynamic decision making tasks that are characterized by high workload, time constraints, risk, or stress. A study was conducted to examine the hypothesis that framing can introduce affective components to the decision making process and can influence, either favorably (positive frame) or adversely (negative frame), the implementation and use of decision making strategies in dynamic high-workload environments. Results indicated that negative frame participants were significantly impaired in developing and employing a simple optimal decision strategy relative to a positive frame group. Discussion focuses on implications of these results for models of dynamic decision making.

Saccadic eye movements as an index of perceptual decision-making.

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McSorley, Eugene; McCloy, Rachel

2009-10-01

One of the most common decisions we make is the one about where to move our eyes next. Here we examine the impact that processing the evidence supporting competing options has on saccade programming. Participants were asked to saccade to one of two possible visual targets indicated by a cloud of moving dots. We varied the evidence which supported saccade target choice by manipulating the proportion of dots moving towards one target or the other. The task was found to become easier as the evidence supporting target choice increased. This was reflected in an increase in percent correct and a decrease in saccade latency. The trajectory and landing position of saccades were found to deviate away from the non-selected target reflecting the choice of the target and the inhibition of the non-target. The extent of the deviation was found to increase with amount of sensory evidence supporting target choice. This shows that decision-making processes involved in saccade target choice have an impact on the spatial control of a saccade. This would seem to extend the notion of the processes involved in the control of saccade metrics beyond a competition between visual stimuli to one also reflecting a competition between options.

Audiovisual speech perception development at varying levels of perceptual processing.

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Lalonde, Kaylah; Holt, Rachael Frush

2016-04-01

This study used the auditory evaluation framework [Erber (1982). Auditory Training (Alexander Graham Bell Association, Washington, DC)] to characterize the influence of visual speech on audiovisual (AV) speech perception in adults and children at multiple levels of perceptual processing. Six- to eight-year-old children and adults completed auditory and AV speech perception tasks at three levels of perceptual processing (detection, discrimination, and recognition). The tasks differed in the level of perceptual processing required to complete them. Adults and children demonstrated visual speech influence at all levels of perceptual processing. Whereas children demonstrated the same visual speech influence at each level of perceptual processing, adults demonstrated greater visual speech influence on tasks requiring higher levels of perceptual processing. These results support previous research demonstrating multiple mechanisms of AV speech processing (general perceptual and speech-specific mechanisms) with independent maturational time courses. The results suggest that adults rely on both general perceptual mechanisms that apply to all levels of perceptual processing and speech-specific mechanisms that apply when making phonetic decisions and/or accessing the lexicon. Six- to eight-year-old children seem to rely only on general perceptual mechanisms across levels. As expected, developmental differences in AV benefit on this and other recognition tasks likely reflect immature speech-specific mechanisms and phonetic processing in children.

Perceptual learning: top to bottom.

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Amitay, Sygal; Zhang, Yu-Xuan; Jones, Pete R; Moore, David R

2014-06-01

Perceptual learning has traditionally been portrayed as a bottom-up phenomenon that improves encoding or decoding of the trained stimulus. Cognitive skills such as attention and memory are thought to drive, guide and modulate learning but are, with notable exceptions, not generally considered to undergo changes themselves as a result of training with simple perceptual tasks. Moreover, shifts in threshold are interpreted as shifts in perceptual sensitivity, with no consideration for non-sensory factors (such as response bias) that may contribute to these changes. Accumulating evidence from our own research and others shows that perceptual learning is a conglomeration of effects, with training-induced changes ranging from the lowest (noise reduction in the phase locking of auditory signals) to the highest (working memory capacity) level of processing, and includes contributions from non-sensory factors that affect decision making even on a "simple" auditory task such as frequency discrimination. We discuss our emerging view of learning as a process that increases the signal-to-noise ratio associated with perceptual tasks by tackling noise sources and inefficiencies that cause performance bottlenecks, and present some implications for training populations other than young, smart, attentive and highly-motivated college students. Crown Copyright © 2013. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Perceptual-cognitive skill and the in situ performance of soccer players.

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van Maarseveen, Mariëtte J J; Oudejans, Raôul R D; Mann, David L; Savelsbergh, Geert J P

2018-02-01

Many studies have shown that experts possess better perceptual-cognitive skills than novices (e.g., in anticipation, decision making, pattern recall), but it remains unclear whether a relationship exists between performance on those tests of perceptual-cognitive skill and actual on-field performance. In this study, we assessed the in situ performance of skilled soccer players and related the outcomes to measures of anticipation, decision making, and pattern recall. In addition, we examined gaze behaviour when performing the perceptual-cognitive tests to better understand whether the underlying processes were related when those perceptual-cognitive tasks were performed. The results revealed that on-field performance could not be predicted on the basis of performance on the perceptual-cognitive tests. Moreover, there were no strong correlations between the level of performance on the different tests. The analysis of gaze behaviour revealed differences in search rate, fixation duration, fixation order, gaze entropy, and percentage viewing time when performing the test of pattern recall, suggesting that it is driven by different processes to those used for anticipation and decision making. Altogether, the results suggest that the perceptual-cognitive tests may not be as strong determinants of actual performance as may have previously been assumed.

Lexical Complexity of Decision-Making Writing Tasks: Form-focused Guided Strategic Planning

OpenAIRE

Mahdavirad, Fatemeh

2016-01-01

The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of form-focused guided strategic planning on lexical complexity of learners’ performance in writing tasks. The twenty intermediate level participants of the study performed an unplanned and then a planned decision-making task. In the planned task condition, the participants were provided with form-focused guided strategic planning which contained detailed instructions about how to plan, by being instructed to focus on form. The guidanc...

Multisensory perceptual learning is dependent upon task difficulty.

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De Niear, Matthew A; Koo, Bonhwang; Wallace, Mark T

2016-11-01

There has been a growing interest in developing behavioral tasks to enhance temporal acuity as recent findings have demonstrated changes in temporal processing in a number of clinical conditions. Prior research has demonstrated that perceptual training can enhance temporal acuity both within and across different sensory modalities. Although certain forms of unisensory perceptual learning have been shown to be dependent upon task difficulty, this relationship has not been explored for multisensory learning. The present study sought to determine the effects of task difficulty on multisensory perceptual learning. Prior to and following a single training session, participants completed a simultaneity judgment (SJ) task, which required them to judge whether a visual stimulus (flash) and auditory stimulus (beep) presented in synchrony or at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) occurred synchronously or asynchronously. During the training session, participants completed the same SJ task but received feedback regarding the accuracy of their responses. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three levels of difficulty during training: easy, moderate, and hard, which were distinguished based on the SOAs used during training. We report that only the most difficult (i.e., hard) training protocol enhanced temporal acuity. We conclude that perceptual training protocols for enhancing multisensory temporal acuity may be optimized by employing audiovisual stimuli for which it is difficult to discriminate temporal synchrony from asynchrony.

Beta oscillations reflect supramodal information during perceptual judgment.

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Haegens, Saskia; Vergara, José; Rossi-Pool, Román; Lemus, Luis; Romo, Ranulfo

2017-12-26

Previous work on perceptual decision making in the sensorimotor system has shown population dynamics in the beta band, corresponding to the encoding of stimulus properties and the final decision outcome. Here, we asked how oscillatory dynamics in the medial premotor cortex (MPC) contribute to supramodal perceptual decision making. We recorded local field potentials (LFPs) and spikes in two monkeys trained to perform a tactile-acoustic frequency discrimination task, including both unimodal and crossmodal conditions. We studied the role of oscillatory activity as a function of stimulus properties (frequency and sensory modality), as well as decision outcome. We found that beta-band power correlated with relevant stimulus properties: there was a significant modulation by stimulus frequency during the working-memory (WM) retention interval, as well as modulation by stimulus modality-the latter was observed only in the case of a purely unimodal task, where modality information was relevant to prepare for the upcoming second stimulus. Furthermore, we found a significant modulation of beta power during the comparison and decision period, which was predictive of decision outcome. Finally, beta-band spike-field coherence (SFC) matched these LFP observations. In conclusion, we demonstrate that beta power in MPC is reflective of stimulus features in a supramodal, context-dependent manner, and additionally reflects the decision outcome. We propose that these beta modulations are a signature of the recruitment of functional neuronal ensembles, which encode task-relevant information.

Linking Theoretical Decision-making Mechanisms in the Simon Task with Electrophysiological Data: A Model-based Neuroscience Study in Humans.

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Servant, Mathieu; White, Corey; Montagnini, Anna; Burle, Borís

2016-10-01

A current challenge for decision-making research is in extending models of simple decisions to more complex and ecological choice situations. Conflict tasks (e.g., Simon, Stroop, Eriksen flanker) have been the focus of much interest, because they provide a decision-making context representative of everyday life experiences. Modeling efforts have led to an elaborated drift diffusion model for conflict tasks (DMC), which implements a superimposition of automatic and controlled decision activations. The DMC has proven to capture the diversity of behavioral conflict effects across various task contexts. This study combined DMC predictions with EEG and EMG measurements to test a set of linking propositions that specify the relationship between theoretical decision-making mechanisms involved in the Simon task and brain activity. Our results are consistent with a representation of the superimposed decision variable in the primary motor cortices. The decision variable was also observed in the EMG activity of response agonist muscles. These findings provide new insight into the neurophysiology of human decision-making. In return, they provide support for the DMC model framework.

Decision Making in Adults with ADHD

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Montyla, Timo; Still, Johanna; Gullberg, Stina; Del Missier, Fabio

2012-01-01

Objectives: This study examined decision-making competence in ADHD by using multiple decision tasks with varying demands on analytic versus affective processes. Methods: Adults with ADHD and healthy controls completed two tasks of analytic decision making, as measured by the Adult Decision-Making Competence (A-DMC) battery, and two affective…

SOLVING OPTIMAL ASSEMBLY LINE CONFIGURATION TASK BY MULTIOBJECTIVE DECISION MAKING METHODS

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Ján ČABALA

2017-06-01

Full Text Available This paper deals with looking for the optimal configuration of automated assembly line model placed within Department of Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence (DCAI. In order to solve this problem, Stateflow model of each configuration was created to simulate the behaviour of particular assembly line configuration. Outputs from these models were used as inputs into the multiobjective decision making process. Multi-objective decision-making methods were subsequently used to find the optimal configuration of assembly line. Paper describes the whole process of solving this task, from building the models to choosing the best configuration. Specifically, the problem was resolved using the experts’ evaluation method for evaluating the weights of every decision-making criterion, while the ELECTRE III, TOPSIS and AGREPREF methods were used for ordering the possible solutions from the most to the least suitable alternative. Obtained results were compared and final solution of this multi-objective decisionmaking problem is chosen.

Effects of Healthy Aging and Mild Cognitive Impairment on a Real-Life Decision-Making Task.

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Pertl, Marie-Theres; Benke, Thomas; Zamarian, Laura; Delazer, Margarete

2017-01-01

In this study, we investigated the effects of age and of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) on decision making under risk by adopting a task representing real-life health-related situations and involving complex numerical information. Moreover, we assessed the relationship of real-life decision making to other cognitive functions such as number processing, executive functions, language, memory, and attention. For this reason, we compared the performance of 19 healthy, relatively younger adults with that of 18 healthy older adults and the performance of the 18 healthy older adults with that of 17 patients with MCI. Results indicated difficulties in real-life decision making for the healthy older adults compared with the healthy, relatively younger adults. Difficulties of patients with MCI relative to the healthy older adults arose in particular in difficult items requiring processing of frequencies and fractions. Significant effects of age and of MCI in processing frequencies were also evident in a ratio number comparison task. Decision-making performance of healthy participants and of the patient group correlated significantly with number processing. There was a further significant correlation with executive functions for the healthy participants and with reading comprehension for the patients. Our results suggest that healthy older individuals and patients with MCI make less advantageous decisions when the information is complex and high demands are put on executive functions and numerical abilities. Moreover, we show that executive functions and numerical abilities are not only essential in laboratory gambling tasks but also in more realistic and ecological decision situations within the health context.

Perceptual differentiation and category effects in normal object recognition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gerlach, Christian; Law, I; Gade, A

1999-01-01

The purpose of the present PET study was (i) to investigate the neural correlates of object recognition, i.e. the matching of visual forms to memory, and (ii) to test the hypothesis that this process is more difficult for natural objects than for artefacts. This was done by using object decision...... tasks where subjects decided whether pictures represented real objects or non-objects. The object decision tasks differed in their difficulty (the degree of perceptual differentiation needed to perform them) and in the category of the real objects used (natural objects versus artefacts). A clear effect...... be the neural correlate of matching visual forms to memory, and the amount of activation in these regions may correspond to the degree of perceptual differentiation required for recognition to occur. With respect to behaviour, it took significantly longer to make object decisions on natural objects than...

Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis for Health Care Decision Making--An Introduction: Report 1 of the ISPOR MCDA Emerging Good Practices Task Force.

Science.gov (United States)

Thokala, Praveen; Devlin, Nancy; Marsh, Kevin; Baltussen, Rob; Boysen, Meindert; Kalo, Zoltan; Longrenn, Thomas; Mussen, Filip; Peacock, Stuart; Watkins, John; Ijzerman, Maarten

2016-01-01

Health care decisions are complex and involve confronting trade-offs between multiple, often conflicting, objectives. Using structured, explicit approaches to decisions involving multiple criteria can improve the quality of decision making and a set of techniques, known under the collective heading multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA), are useful for this purpose. MCDA methods are widely used in other sectors, and recently there has been an increase in health care applications. In 2014, ISPOR established an MCDA Emerging Good Practices Task Force. It was charged with establishing a common definition for MCDA in health care decision making and developing good practice guidelines for conducting MCDA to aid health care decision making. This initial ISPOR MCDA task force report provides an introduction to MCDA - it defines MCDA; provides examples of its use in different kinds of decision making in health care (including benefit risk analysis, health technology assessment, resource allocation, portfolio decision analysis, shared patient clinician decision making and prioritizing patients' access to services); provides an overview of the principal methods of MCDA; and describes the key steps involved. Upon reviewing this report, readers should have a solid overview of MCDA methods and their potential for supporting health care decision making. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Mental fatigue impairs soccer-specific decision-making skill.

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, Mitchell R; Zeuwts, Linus; Lenoir, Matthieu; Hens, Nathalie; De Jong, Laura M S; Coutts, Aaron J

2016-07-01

This study aimed to investigate the impact of mental fatigue on soccer-specific decision-making. Twelve well-trained male soccer players performed a soccer-specific decision-making task on two occasions, separated by at least 72 h. The decision-making task was preceded in a randomised order by 30 min of the Stroop task (mental fatigue) or 30 min of reading from magazines (control). Subjective ratings of mental fatigue were measured before and after treatment, and mental effort (referring to treatment) and motivation (referring to the decision-making task) were measured after treatment. Performance on the soccer-specific decision-making task was assessed using response accuracy and time. Visual search behaviour was also assessed throughout the decision-making task. Subjective ratings of mental fatigue and effort were almost certainly higher following the Stroop task compared to the magazines. Motivation for the upcoming decision-making task was possibly higher following the Stroop task. Decision-making accuracy was very likely lower and response time likely higher in the mental fatigue condition. Mental fatigue had unclear effects on most visual search behaviour variables. The results suggest that mental fatigue impairs accuracy and speed of soccer-specific decision-making. These impairments are not likely related to changes in visual search behaviour.

Decision-Making and the Iowa Gambling Task: Ecological validity in individuals with substance dependence

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Antonio Verdejo-Garcia

2006-03-01

Full Text Available Substance Dependent Individuals (SDIs usually show deficits in real-life decision-making, as illustrated by their persistence in drug use despite a rise in undesirable consequences. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT is an instrument that factors a number of aspects of real-life decision-making. Although most SDIs are impaired on the IGT, there is a subgroup of them who perform normally on this task. One possible explanation for this differential performance is that impairment in decision-making is largely detected on the IGT when the use of drugs escalates in the face of rising adverse consequences. The aim of this study is to test this hypothesis, by examining if several real-life indices associated with escalation of addiction severity (as measured by the Addiction Severity Index -ASI- are predictive of risky decisions, as revealed by impaired performance on different versions of the IGT. We administered the ASI and different versions of the IGT (the main IGT version, a variant IGT version, and two parallel versions of each to a large sample of SDI. We used regression models to examine the predictive effects of the seven real-life domains assessed by the ASI on decision-making performance as measured by the IGT. We included in regression models both ASI-derived objective and subjective measures of each problem domain. Results showed (i that several aspects of real-life functioning associated with addiction severity were moderate predictors of IGT decision-making performance; (ii that the combined assessment of decision-making using different versions of the IGT yielded better predictive measures than assessment using isolated versions of the IGT; and (iii that objective measures of real-life functioning were better predictors of decision-making performance on the IGT than subjective measures based on SDI's insight about their problems. These results support the notion that decision-making deficits as measured by the IGT are associated with a rise in

Modeling Search Behaviors during the Acquisition of Expertise in a Sequential Decision-Making Task

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cristóbal Moënne-Loccoz

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Our daily interaction with the world is plagued of situations in which we develop expertise through self-motivated repetition of the same task. In many of these interactions, and especially when dealing with computer and machine interfaces, we must deal with sequences of decisions and actions. For instance, when drawing cash from an ATM machine, choices are presented in a step-by-step fashion and a specific sequence of choices must be performed in order to produce the expected outcome. But, as we become experts in the use of such interfaces, is it possible to identify specific search and learning strategies? And if so, can we use this information to predict future actions? In addition to better understanding the cognitive processes underlying sequential decision making, this could allow building adaptive interfaces that can facilitate interaction at different moments of the learning curve. Here we tackle the question of modeling sequential decision-making behavior in a simple human-computer interface that instantiates a 4-level binary decision tree (BDT task. We record behavioral data from voluntary participants while they attempt to solve the task. Using a Hidden Markov Model-based approach that capitalizes on the hierarchical structure of behavior, we then model their performance during the interaction. Our results show that partitioning the problem space into a small set of hierarchically related stereotyped strategies can potentially capture a host of individual decision making policies. This allows us to follow how participants learn and develop expertise in the use of the interface. Moreover, using a Mixture of Experts based on these stereotyped strategies, the model is able to predict the behavior of participants that master the task.

Reasoning and mathematical skills contribute to normatively superior decision making under risk: evidence from the game of dice task.

Science.gov (United States)

Pertl, Marie-Theres; Zamarian, Laura; Delazer, Margarete

2017-08-01

In this study, we assessed to what extent reasoning improves performance in decision making under risk in a laboratory gambling task (Game of Dice Task-Double, GDT-D). We also investigated to what degree individuals with above average mathematical competence decide better than those with average mathematical competence. Eighty-five participants performed the GDT-D and several numerical tasks. Forty-two individuals were asked to calculate the probabilities and the outcomes associated with the different options of the GDT-D before performing it. The other 43 individuals performed the GDT-D at the beginning of the test session. Both reasoning and mathematical competence had a positive effect on decision making. Different measures of mathematical competence correlated with advantageous performance in decision making. Results suggest that decision making under explicit risk conditions improves when individuals are encouraged to reflect about the contingencies of a decision situation. Interventions based on numerical reasoning may also be useful for patients with difficulties in decision making.

Task-relevant perceptual features can define categories in visual memory too.

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Antonelli, Karla B; Williams, Carrick C

2017-11-01

Although Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, and Oliva (2010, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(3), 558) claim that visual long-term memory (VLTM) is organized on underlying conceptual, not perceptual, information, visual memory results from visual search tasks are not well explained by this theory. We hypothesized that when viewing an object, any task-relevant visual information is critical to the organizational structure of VLTM. In two experiments, we examined the organization of VLTM by measuring the amount of retroactive interference created by objects possessing different combinations of task-relevant features. Based on task instructions, only the conceptual category was task relevant or both the conceptual category and a perceptual object feature were task relevant. Findings indicated that when made task relevant, perceptual object feature information, along with conceptual category information, could affect memory organization for objects in VLTM. However, when perceptual object feature information was task irrelevant, it did not contribute to memory organization; instead, memory defaulted to being organized around conceptual category information. These findings support the theory that a task-defined organizational structure is created in VLTM based on the relevance of particular object features and information.

Generation and Perceptual Implicit Memory: Different Generation Tasks Produce Different Effects on Perceptual Priming

Science.gov (United States)

Mulligan, Neil W.; Dew, Ilana T. Z.

2009-01-01

The generation manipulation has been critical in delineating differences between implicit and explicit memory. In contrast to past research, the present experiments indicate that generating from a rhyme cue produces as much perceptual priming as does reading. This is demonstrated for 3 visual priming tasks: perceptual identification, word-fragment…

Rodent models of adaptive decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Izquierdo, Alicia; Belcher, Annabelle M

2012-01-01

Adaptive decision making affords the animal the ability to respond quickly to changes in a dynamic environment: one in which attentional demands, cost or effort to procure the reward, and reward contingencies change frequently. The more flexible the organism is in adapting choice behavior, the more command and success the organism has in navigating its environment. Maladaptive decision making is at the heart of much neuropsychiatric disease, including addiction. Thus, a better understanding of the mechanisms that underlie normal, adaptive decision making helps achieve a better understanding of certain diseases that incorporate maladaptive decision making as a core feature. This chapter presents three general domains of methods that the experimenter can manipulate in animal decision-making tasks: attention, effort, and reward contingency. Here, we present detailed methods of rodent tasks frequently employed within these domains: the Attentional Set-Shift Task, Effortful T-maze Task, and Visual Discrimination Reversal Learning. These tasks all recruit regions within the frontal cortex and the striatum, and performance is heavily modulated by the neurotransmitter dopamine, making these assays highly valid measures in the study of psychostimulant addiction.

Mild cognitive impairment is associated with poorer decision-making in community-based older persons.

Science.gov (United States)

Han, S Duke; Boyle, Patricia A; James, Bryan D; Yu, Lei; Bennett, David A

2015-04-01

To test the hypothesis that mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is associated with poorer financial and healthcare decision-making. Community-based epidemiological cohort study. Communities throughout northeastern Illinois. Older persons without dementia from the Rush Memory and Aging Project (N = 730). All participants underwent a detailed clinical evaluation and decision-making assessment using a measure that closely approximates materials used in real-world financial and healthcare settings. This allowed for measurement of total decision-making and financial and healthcare decision-making. Regression models were used to examine whether MCI was associated with a lower level of decision-making. In subsequent analyses, the relationship between specific cognitive systems (episodic memory, semantic memory, working memory, perceptual speed, visuospatial ability) and decision-making was explored in participants with MCI. MCI was associated with lower total, financial, and healthcare decision-making scores after accounting for the effects of age, education, and sex. The effect of MCI on total decision-making was equivalent to the effect of more than 10 additional years of age. Additional models showed that, when considering multiple cognitive systems, perceptual speed accounted for the most variance in decision-making in participants with MCI. Persons with MCI may have poorer financial and healthcare decision-making in real-world situations, and perceptual speed may be an important contributor to poorer decision-making in persons with MCI. © 2015, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation © 2015, The American Geriatrics Society.

Visual Perceptual Learning and Models.

Science.gov (United States)

Dosher, Barbara; Lu, Zhong-Lin

2017-09-15

Visual perceptual learning through practice or training can significantly improve performance on visual tasks. Originally seen as a manifestation of plasticity in the primary visual cortex, perceptual learning is more readily understood as improvements in the function of brain networks that integrate processes, including sensory representations, decision, attention, and reward, and balance plasticity with system stability. This review considers the primary phenomena of perceptual learning, theories of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning's effect on signal and noise in visual processing and decision. Models, especially computational models, play a key role in behavioral and physiological investigations of the mechanisms of perceptual learning and for understanding, predicting, and optimizing human perceptual processes, learning, and performance. Performance improvements resulting from reweighting or readout of sensory inputs to decision provide a strong theoretical framework for interpreting perceptual learning and transfer that may prove useful in optimizing learning in real-world applications.

Choosing the rules: distinct and overlapping frontoparietal representations of task rules for perceptual decisions.

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Zhang, Jiaxiang; Kriegeskorte, Nikolaus; Carlin, Johan D; Rowe, James B

2013-07-17

Behavior is governed by rules that associate stimuli with responses and outcomes. Human and monkey studies have shown that rule-specific information is widely represented in the frontoparietal cortex. However, it is not known how establishing a rule under different contexts affects its neural representation. Here, we use event-related functional MRI (fMRI) and multivoxel pattern classification methods to investigate the human brain's mechanisms of establishing and maintaining rules for multiple perceptual decision tasks. Rules were either chosen by participants or specifically instructed to them, and the fMRI activation patterns representing rule-specific information were compared between these contexts. We show that frontoparietal regions differ in the properties of their rule representations during active maintenance before execution. First, rule-specific information maintained in the dorsolateral and medial frontal cortex depends on the context in which it was established (chosen vs specified). Second, rule representations maintained in the ventrolateral frontal and parietal cortex are independent of the context in which they were established. Furthermore, we found that the rule-specific coding maintained in anticipation of stimuli may change with execution of the rule: representations in context-independent regions remain invariant from maintenance to execution stages, whereas rule representations in context-dependent regions do not generalize to execution stage. The identification of distinct frontoparietal systems with context-independent and context-dependent task rule representations, and the distinction between anticipatory and executive rule representations, provide new insights into the functional architecture of goal-directed behavior.

A Longitudinal Analysis of Adolescent Decision-Making with the Iowa Gambling Task

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Almy, Brandon; Kuskowski, Michael; Malone, Stephen M.; Myers, Evan; Luciana, Monica

2018-01-01

Many researchers have used the standard Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) to assess decision-making in adolescence given increased risk-taking during this developmental period. Most studies are cross-sectional and do not observe behavioral trajectories over time, limiting interpretation. This longitudinal study investigated healthy adolescents' and young…

Functional imaging of decision conflict.

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Pochon, Jean-Baptiste; Riis, Jason; Sanfey, Alan G; Nystrom, Leigh E; Cohen, Jonathan D

2008-03-26

Decision conflict occurs when people feel uncertain as to which option to choose from a set of similarly attractive (or unattractive) options, with many studies demonstrating that this conflict can lead to suboptimal decision making. In this article, we investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of decision conflict, in particular, the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Previous studies have implicated the ACC in conflict monitoring during perceptual tasks, but there is considerable controversy as to whether the ACC actually indexes conflict related to choice, or merely conflict related to selection of competing motor responses. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we dissociate the decision and response phases of a decision task, and show that the ACC does indeed index conflict at the decision stage. Furthermore, we show that it does so for a complex decision task, one that requires the integration of beliefs and preferences and not just perceptual judgments.

Towards a cognitive robotics methodology for reward-based decision-making: dynamical systems modelling of the Iowa Gambling Task

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Lowe, Robert; Ziemke, Tom

2010-09-01

The somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) posits that the role of emotions and mental states in decision-making manifests through bodily responses to stimuli of import to the organism's welfare. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), proposed by Bechara and Damasio in the mid-1990s, has provided the major source of empirical validation to the role of somatic markers in the service of flexible and cost-effective decision-making in humans. In recent years the IGT has been the subject of much criticism concerning: (1) whether measures of somatic markers reveal that they are important for decision-making as opposed to behaviour preparation; (2) the underlying neural substrate posited as critical to decision-making of the type relevant to the task; and (3) aspects of the methodological approach used, particularly on the canonical version of the task. In this paper, a cognitive robotics methodology is proposed to explore a dynamical systems approach as it applies to the neural computation of reward-based learning and issues concerning embodiment. This approach is particularly relevant in light of a strongly emerging alternative hypothesis to the SMH, the reversal learning hypothesis, which links, behaviourally and neurocomputationally, a number of more or less complex reward-based decision-making tasks, including the 'A-not-B' task - already subject to dynamical systems investigations with a focus on neural activation dynamics. It is also suggested that the cognitive robotics methodology may be used to extend systematically the IGT benchmark to more naturalised, but nevertheless controlled, settings that might better explore the extent to which the SMH, and somatic states per se, impact on complex decision-making.

Characterization of children's decision making: Sensitivity to punishment frequency, not task complexity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Crone, E.A.; Bunge, S.A.; Latenstein, H.; van der Molen, M.W.

2005-01-01

On a gambling task that models real-life decision making, children between ages 7 and 12 perform like patients with bilateral lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), opting for choices that yield high immediate gains in spite of higher future losses (Crone & Van der Molen, 2004). The

The Role of the Lateral Intraparietal Area in (the Study of) Decision Making.

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Huk, Alexander C; Katz, Leor N; Yates, Jacob L

2017-07-25

Over the past two decades, neurophysiological responses in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) have received extensive study for insight into decision making. In a parallel manner, inferred cognitive processes have enriched interpretations of LIP activity. Because of this bidirectional interplay between physiology and cognition, LIP has served as fertile ground for developing quantitative models that link neural activity with decision making. These models stand as some of the most important frameworks for linking brain and mind, and they are now mature enough to be evaluated in finer detail and integrated with other lines of investigation of LIP function. Here, we focus on the relationship between LIP responses and known sensory and motor events in perceptual decision-making tasks, as assessed by correlative and causal methods. The resulting sensorimotor-focused approach offers an account of LIP activity as a multiplexed amalgam of sensory, cognitive, and motor-related activity, with a complex and often indirect relationship to decision processes. Our data-driven focus on multiplexing (and de-multiplexing) of various response components can complement decision-focused models and provides more detailed insight into how neural signals might relate to cognitive processes such as decision making.

Anorexia, bulimia, and obesity: shared decision making deficits on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT).

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Brogan, Amy; Hevey, David; Pignatti, Riccardo

2010-07-01

The pathological eating behaviors in Anorexia Nervosa (AN), Bulimia Nervosa (BN), and obesity are characterized by a preference for high immediate reward, despite higher future losses in terms of both physical and psychological outcomes. The present study compared the decision making profile of females with a diagnosis of AN (n = 22), BN (n = 17), obesity (n = 18), and a healthy weight comparison group (n = 20) using a standardized neuropsychological test, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). The three clinical groups (AN, BN, obesity) were significantly impaired on the IGT compared with the comparison group on both overall task performance and task learning; however, the three clinical groups were not significantly different from each other. Sixty-one percent to 77% of the clinical groups reached the threshold for impairment on the IGT, compared with 15% of the comparison group. The potential basis for this shared decision making profile is discussed.

Gaze-contingent training enhances perceptual skill acquisition.

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Ryu, Donghyun; Mann, David L; Abernethy, Bruce; Poolton, Jamie M

2016-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine whether decision-making skill in perceptual-cognitive tasks could be enhanced using a training technique that impaired selective areas of the visual field. Recreational basketball players performed perceptual training over 3 days while viewing with a gaze-contingent manipulation that displayed either (a) a moving window (clear central and blurred peripheral vision), (b) a moving mask (blurred central and clear peripheral vision), or (c) full (unrestricted) vision. During the training, participants watched video clips of basketball play and at the conclusion of each clip made a decision about to which teammate the player in possession of the ball should pass. A further control group watched unrelated videos with full vision. The effects of training were assessed using separate tests of decision-making skill conducted in a pretest, posttest, and 2-week retention test. The accuracy of decision making was greater in the posttest than in the pretest for all three intervention groups when compared with the control group. Remarkably, training with blurred peripheral vision resulted in a further improvement in performance from posttest to retention test that was not apparent for the other groups. The type of training had no measurable impact on the visual search strategies of the participants, and so the training improvements appear to be grounded in changes in information pickup. The findings show that learning with impaired peripheral vision offers a promising form of training to support improvements in perceptual skill.

Mild Cognitive Impairment is Associated with PoorerDecision Making in Community-Based Older Persons

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Duke Han, S.; Boyle, Patricia A.; James, Bryan D.; Yu, Lei; Bennett, David A.

2015-01-01

Background/Objectives Financial and healthcare decision making are important for maintaining wellbeing and independence in old age. We tested the hypothesis that Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is associated with poorer decision making in financial and healthcare matters. Design Community-based epidemiologic cohort study. Setting Communities throughout Northeastern Illinois. Participants Participants were 730 older nondemented persons from the Rush Memory and Aging Project. Measurements All participants underwent a detailed clinical evaluation and decision making assessment using a measure that closely approximates materials utilized in real world financial and healthcare settings. This allowed for measurement of total decision making, as well as financial and healthcare decision making. Regression models were used to examine whether the presence of MCI was associated with a lower level of decision making. In subsequent analyses, we explored the relation of specific cognitive systems (i.e., episodic memory, semantic memory, working memory, perceptual speed, and visuospatial ability) with decision making in those with MCI. Results Results showed that MCI was associated with lower decision making total scores as well as financial and healthcare scores, respectively, after accounting for the effects of age, education, and sex. The effect of MCI on total decision making was equivalent to the effect of more than 10 additional years of age. Additional models showed that when considering multiple cognitive systems, perceptual speed accounted for the most variance in decision making among participants with MCI. Conclusion Results suggest that persons with MCI may exhibit poorer financial and healthcare decision making in real world situations, and that perceptual speed may be an important contributor to poorer decision making among persons with MCI. PMID:25850350

Rodent versions of the Iowa Gambling Task: opportunities and challenges for the understanding of decision-making

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Leonie ede Visser

2011-10-01

Full Text Available Impaired decision-making is a core problem in several psychiatric disorders including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, mania, drug addiction, eating disorders, and substance abuse as well as in chronic pain. To ensure progress in the understanding of the neuropathophysiology of these disorders, animals models with good construct and predictive validity are indispensable. Many human studies aimed at measuring decision-making capacities use the Iowa Gambling Task, a task designed to model every-day life choices through a conflict between immediate gratification and long-term outcomes. Recently, new rodent models based on the same principle have been developed to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying IGT-like decision-making on behavioral, neural and pharmacological levels. The comparative strengths, as well as the similarities and differences between these paradigms are discussed. The contribution of these models to elucidate the neurobehavioral factors that lead to poor decision-making and to the development of better treatments for psychiatric illness is considered, along with important future directions and potential limitations.

A Plastic Cortico-Striatal Circuit Model of Adaptation in Perceptual Decision

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Pao-Yueh eHsiao

2013-12-01

Full Text Available The ability to optimize decisions and adapt them to changing environments is a crucial brain function that increase survivability. Although much has been learned about the neuronal activity in various brain regions that are associated with decision making, and about how the nervous systems may learn to achieve optimization, the underlying neuronal mechanisms of how the nervous systems optimize decision strategies with preference given to speed or accuracy, and how the systems adapt to changes in the environment, remain unclear. Based on extensive empirical observations, we addressed the question by extending a previously described cortico-basal ganglia circuit model of perceptual decisions with the inclusion of a dynamic dopamine (DA system that modulates spike-timing dependent plasticity. We found that, once an optimal model setting that maximized the reward rate was selected, the same setting automatically optimized decisions across different task environments through dynamic balancing between the facilitating and depressing components of the DA dynamics. Interestingly, other model parameters were also optimal if we considered the reward rate that was weighted by the subject’s preferences for speed or accuracy. Specifically, the circuit model favored speed if we increased the phasic DA response to the reward prediction error, whereas the model favored accuracy if we reduced the tonic DA activity or the phasic DA responses to the estimated reward probability. The proposed model provides insight into the roles of different components of DA responses in decision adaptation and optimization in a changing environment.

The nature of impulsivity: visual exposure to natural environments decreases impulsive decision-making in a delay discounting task.

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Meredith S Berry

Full Text Available The benefits of visual exposure to natural environments for human well-being in areas of stress reduction, mood improvement, and attention restoration are well documented, but the effects of natural environments on impulsive decision-making remain unknown. Impulsive decision-making in delay discounting offers generality, predictive validity, and insight into decision-making related to unhealthy behaviors. The present experiment evaluated differences in such decision-making in humans experiencing visual exposure to one of the following conditions: natural (e.g., mountains, built (e.g., buildings, or control (e.g., triangles using a delay discounting task that required participants to choose between immediate and delayed hypothetical monetary outcomes. Participants viewed the images before and during the delay discounting task. Participants were less impulsive in the condition providing visual exposure to natural scenes compared to built and geometric scenes. Results suggest that exposure to natural environments results in decreased impulsive decision-making relative to built environments.

Computational modelling and analysis of hippocampal-prefrontal information coding during a spatial decision-making task

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Thomas eJahans-Price

2014-03-01

Full Text Available We introduce a computational model describing rat behaviour and the interactions of neural populations processing spatial and mnemonic information during a maze-based, decision-making task. The model integrates sensory input and implements a working memory to inform decisions at a choice point, reproducing rat behavioural data and predicting the occurrence of turn- and memory-dependent activity in neuronal networks supporting task performance. We tested these model predictions using a new software toolbox (Maze Query Language, MQL to analyse activity of medial prefrontal cortical (mPFC and dorsal hippocampal (dCA1 neurons recorded from 6 adult rats during task performance. The firing rates of dCA1 neurons discriminated context (i.e. the direction of the previous turn, whilst a subset of mPFC neurons was selective for current turn direction or context, with some conjunctively encoding both. mPFC turn-selective neurons displayed a ramping of activity on approach to the decision turn and turn-selectivity in mPFC was significantly reduced during error trials. These analyses complement data from neurophysiological recordings in non-human primates indicating that firing rates of cortical neurons correlate with integration of sensory evidence used to inform decision-making.

Medial prefrontal cortex lesions impair decision-making on a rodent gambling task: reversal by D1 receptor antagonist administration.

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Paine, Tracie A; Asinof, Samuel K; Diehl, Geoffrey W; Frackman, Anna; Leffler, Joseph

2013-04-15

Decision-making is a complex cognitive process that is impaired in a number of psychiatric disorders. In the laboratory, decision-making is frequently assessed using "gambling" tasks that are designed to simulate real-life decisions in terms of uncertainty, reward and punishment. Here, we investigate whether lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) cause impairments in decision-making using a rodent gambling task (rGT). In this task, rats have to decide between 1 of 4 possible options: 2 options are considered "advantageous" and lead to greater net rewards (food pellets) than the other 2 "disadvantageous" options. Once rats attained stable levels of performance on the rGT they underwent sham or excitoxic lesions of the medial PFC and were allowed to recover for 1 week. Following recovery, rats were retrained for 5 days and then the effects of a dopamine D1-like receptor antagonist (SCH23390) or a D2-like receptor antagonist (haloperidol) on performance were assessed. Lesioned rats exhibited impaired decision-making: they made fewer advantageous choices and chose the most optimal choice less frequently than did sham-operated rats. Administration of SCH23390 (0.03 mg/kg), but not haloperidol (0.015-0.03 mg/kg) attenuated the lesion-induced decision-making deficit. These results indicate that the medial PFC is important for decision-making and that excessive signaling at D1 receptors may contribute to decision-making impairments. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A critical review of sex differences in decision-making tasks: focus on the Iowa Gambling Task.

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van den Bos, Ruud; Homberg, Judith; de Visser, Leonie

2013-02-01

It has been observed that men and women show performance differences in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a task of decision-making in which subjects through exploration learn to differentiate long-term advantageous from long-term disadvantageous decks of cards: men choose more cards from the long-term advantageous decks than women within the standard number of 100 trials. Here, we aim at discussing psychological mechanisms and neurobiological substrates underlying sex differences in IGT-like decision-making. Our review suggests that women focus on both win-loss frequencies and long-term pay-off of decks, while men focus on long-term pay-off. Furthermore, women may be more sensitive to occasional losses in the long-term advantageous decks than men. As a consequence hereof, women need 40-60 trials in addition before they reach the same level of performance as men. These performance differences are related to differences in activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as well as in serotonergic activity and left-right hemispheric activity. Sex differences in orbitofrontal cortex activity may be due to organisational effects of gonadal hormones early in life. The behavioural and neurobiological differences in the IGT between men and women are an expression of more general sex differences in the regulation of emotions. We discuss these findings in the context of sex differences in information processing related to evolutionary processes. Furthermore we discuss the relationship between these findings and real world decision-making. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Goal-Directed Decision Making with Spiking Neurons.

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Friedrich, Johannes; Lengyel, Máté

2016-02-03

Behavioral and neuroscientific data on reward-based decision making point to a fundamental distinction between habitual and goal-directed action selection. The formation of habits, which requires simple updating of cached values, has been studied in great detail, and the reward prediction error theory of dopamine function has enjoyed prominent success in accounting for its neural bases. In contrast, the neural circuit mechanisms of goal-directed decision making, requiring extended iterative computations to estimate values online, are still unknown. Here we present a spiking neural network that provably solves the difficult online value estimation problem underlying goal-directed decision making in a near-optimal way and reproduces behavioral as well as neurophysiological experimental data on tasks ranging from simple binary choice to sequential decision making. Our model uses local plasticity rules to learn the synaptic weights of a simple neural network to achieve optimal performance and solves one-step decision-making tasks, commonly considered in neuroeconomics, as well as more challenging sequential decision-making tasks within 1 s. These decision times, and their parametric dependence on task parameters, as well as the final choice probabilities match behavioral data, whereas the evolution of neural activities in the network closely mimics neural responses recorded in frontal cortices during the execution of such tasks. Our theory provides a principled framework to understand the neural underpinning of goal-directed decision making and makes novel predictions for sequential decision-making tasks with multiple rewards. Goal-directed actions requiring prospective planning pervade decision making, but their circuit-level mechanisms remain elusive. We show how a model circuit of biologically realistic spiking neurons can solve this computationally challenging problem in a novel way. The synaptic weights of our network can be learned using local plasticity rules

Adaptable history biases in human perceptual decisions.

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Abrahamyan, Arman; Silva, Laura Luz; Dakin, Steven C; Carandini, Matteo; Gardner, Justin L

2016-06-21

When making choices under conditions of perceptual uncertainty, past experience can play a vital role. However, it can also lead to biases that worsen decisions. Consistent with previous observations, we found that human choices are influenced by the success or failure of past choices even in a standard two-alternative detection task, where choice history is irrelevant. The typical bias was one that made the subject switch choices after a failure. These choice history biases led to poorer performance and were similar for observers in different countries. They were well captured by a simple logistic regression model that had been previously applied to describe psychophysical performance in mice. Such irrational biases seem at odds with the principles of reinforcement learning, which would predict exquisite adaptability to choice history. We therefore asked whether subjects could adapt their irrational biases following changes in trial order statistics. Adaptability was strong in the direction that confirmed a subject's default biases, but weaker in the opposite direction, so that existing biases could not be eradicated. We conclude that humans can adapt choice history biases, but cannot easily overcome existing biases even if irrational in the current context: adaptation is more sensitive to confirmatory than contradictory statistics.

Distinguishing bias from sensitivity effects in multialternative detection tasks.

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Sridharan, Devarajan; Steinmetz, Nicholas A; Moore, Tirin; Knudsen, Eric I

2014-08-21

Studies investigating the neural bases of cognitive phenomena increasingly employ multialternative detection tasks that seek to measure the ability to detect a target stimulus or changes in some target feature (e.g., orientation or direction of motion) that could occur at one of many locations. In such tasks, it is essential to distinguish the behavioral and neural correlates of enhanced perceptual sensitivity from those of increased bias for a particular location or choice (choice bias). However, making such a distinction is not possible with established approaches. We present a new signal detection model that decouples the behavioral effects of choice bias from those of perceptual sensitivity in multialternative (change) detection tasks. By formulating the perceptual decision in a multidimensional decision space, our model quantifies the respective contributions of bias and sensitivity to multialternative behavioral choices. With a combination of analytical and numerical approaches, we demonstrate an optimal, one-to-one mapping between model parameters and choice probabilities even for tasks involving arbitrarily large numbers of alternatives. We validated the model with published data from two ternary choice experiments: a target-detection experiment and a length-discrimination experiment. The results of this validation provided novel insights into perceptual processes (sensory noise and competitive interactions) that can accurately and parsimoniously account for observers' behavior in each task. The model will find important application in identifying and interpreting the effects of behavioral manipulations (e.g., cueing attention) or neural perturbations (e.g., stimulation or inactivation) in a variety of multialternative tasks of perception, attention, and decision-making. © 2014 ARVO.

The anterior insula bidirectionally modulates cost-benefit decision-making on a rodent gambling task.

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Daniel, M L; Cocker, P J; Lacoste, J; Mar, A C; Houeto, J L; Belin-Rauscent, A; Belin, D

2017-11-01

Deficits in cost-benefit decision-making, as assessed in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), are commonly observed in neuropsychiatric disorders such as addiction. There is considerable variation in the maximization of rewards on such tasks, both in the general population and in rodent models, suggesting individual differences in decision-making may represent a key endophenotype for vulnerability to neuropsychiatric disorders. Increasing evidence suggests that the insular cortex, which is involved in interoception and emotional processes in humans, may be a key neural locus in the control of decision-making processes. However, the extent to which the insula contributes to individual differences in cost-benefit decision-making remains unknown. Using male Sprague Dawley rats, we first assessed individual differences in the performance over the course of a single session on a rodent analogue of the IGT (rGT). Rats were matched for their ability to maximize reward and received bilateral excitotoxic or sham lesions of the anterior insula cortex (AIC). Animals were subsequently challenged on a second rGT session with altered contingencies. Finally, animals were also assessed for instrumental conditioning and reversal learning. AIC lesions produced bidirectional alterations on rGT performance; rats that had performed optimally prior to surgery subsequently showed impairments, and animals that had performed poorly showed improvements in comparison with sham-operated controls. These bidirectional effects were not attributable to alterations in behavioural flexibility or in motivation. These data suggest that the recruitment of the AIC during decision-making may be state-dependent and help guide response selection towards subjectively favourable options. © 2017 The Authors. European Journal of Neuroscience published by Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ecological dynamics of continuous and categorical decision-making: the regatta start in sailing.

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Araújo, Duarte; Davids, Keith; Diniz, Ana; Rocha, Luis; Santos, João Coelho; Dias, Gonçalo; Fernandes, Orlando

2015-01-01

Ecological dynamics of decision-making in the sport of sailing exemplifies emergent, conditionally coupled, co-adaptive behaviours. In this study, observation of the coupling dynamics of paired boats during competitive sailing showed that decision-making can be modelled as a self-sustained, co-adapting system of informationally coupled oscillators (boats). Bytracing the spatial-temporal displacements of the boats, time series analyses (autocorrelations, periodograms and running correlations) revealed that trajectories of match racing boats are coupled more than 88% of the time during a pre-start race, via continuous, competing co-adaptions between boats. Results showed that both the continuously selected trajectories of the sailors (12 years of age) and their categorical starting point locations were examples of emergent decisions. In this dynamical conception of decision-making behaviours, strategic positioning (categorical) and continuous displacement of a boat over the course in match-race sailing emerged as a function of interacting task, personal and environmental constraints. Results suggest how key interacting constraints could be manipulated in practice to enhance sailors' perceptual attunement to them in competition.

Perceptual learning of basic visual features remains task specific with Training-Plus-Exposure (TPE) training.

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Cong, Lin-Juan; Wang, Ru-Jie; Yu, Cong; Zhang, Jun-Yun

2016-01-01

Visual perceptual learning is known to be specific to the trained retinal location, feature, and task. However, location and feature specificity can be eliminated by double-training or TPE training protocols, in which observers receive additional exposure to the transfer location or feature dimension via an irrelevant task besides the primary learning task Here we tested whether these new training protocols could even make learning transfer across different tasks involving discrimination of basic visual features (e.g., orientation and contrast). Observers practiced a near-threshold orientation (or contrast) discrimination task. Following a TPE training protocol, they also received exposure to the transfer task via performing suprathreshold contrast (or orientation) discrimination in alternating blocks of trials in the same sessions. The results showed no evidence for significant learning transfer to the untrained near-threshold contrast (or orientation) discrimination task after discounting the pretest effects and the suprathreshold practice effects. These results thus do not support a hypothetical task-independent component in perceptual learning of basic visual features. They also set the boundary of the new training protocols in their capability to enable learning transfer.

Perceptual decision-making difficulty modulates feedforward effective connectivity to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

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Bidhan eLamichhane

2015-09-01

Full Text Available Diverse cortical structures are known to coordinate activity as a network in relaying and processing of visual information to discriminate visual objects. However, how this discrimination is achieved is still largely unknown. To contribute to answering this question, we used face-house categorization tasks with three levels of noise in face and house images in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI experiments involving thirty-three participants. The behavioral performance error and response time (RT were correlated with noise in face-house images. We then built dynamical causal models (DCM of fMRI blood-oxygenation level dependent (BOLD signals from the face and house category-specific regions in ventral temporal cortex, the fusiform face area (FFA and parahippocampal place area (PPA, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC. We found a strong feed-forward intrinsic connectivity pattern from FFA and PPA to dlPFC. Importantly, the feed-forward connectivity to dlPFC was significantly modulated by the perception of both faces and houses. The dlPFC-BOLD activity, the connectivity from FFA and PPA to the dlPFC all increased with noise level. These results suggest that the FFA-PPA-dlPFC network plays an important role for relaying and integrating competing sensory information to arrive at perceptual decisions.

Acquisition and production of skilled behavior in dynamic decision-making tasks

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Kirlik, Alex

1992-01-01

Detailed summaries of two NASA-funded research projects are provided. The first project was an ecological task analysis of the Star Cruiser model. Star Cruiser is a psychological model designed to test a subject's level of cognitive activity. Ecological task analysis is used as a framework to predict the types of cognitive activity required to achieve productive behavior and to suggest how interfaces can be manipulated to alleviate certain types of cognitive demands. The second project is presented in the form of a thesis for the Masters Degree. The thesis discusses the modeling of decision-making through the use of neural network and genetic-algorithm machine learning technologies.

Tactical decision making under stress (TADMUS) decision support system

OpenAIRE

Morrison, Jeffrey G.; Kelly, Richard T.; Moore, Ronald A.; Hutchins, Susan G.

1996-01-01

A prototype decision support system (DSS) was developed to enhance Navy tactical decision making based on naturalistic decision processes. Displays were developed to support critical decision making tasks through recognition-primed and explanation-based reasoning processes and cognitive analysis of the decision making problems faced by Navy tactical officers in a shipboard Combat Information Center. Baseline testing in high intensity, peace keeping, littoral scenarios indicated...

Passing Decisions in Football: Introducing an Empirical Approach to Estimating the Effects of Perceptual Information and Associative Knowledge.

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Steiner, Silvan

2018-01-01

The importance of various information sources in decision-making in interactive team sports is debated. While some highlight the role of the perceptual information provided by the current game context, others point to the role of knowledge-based information that athletes have regarding their team environment. Recently, an integrative perspective considering the simultaneous involvement of both of these information sources in decision-making in interactive team sports has been presented. In a theoretical example concerning passing decisions, the simultaneous involvement of perceptual and knowledge-based information has been illustrated. However, no precast method of determining the contribution of these two information sources empirically has been provided. The aim of this article is to bridge this gap and present a statistical approach to estimating the effects of perceptual information and associative knowledge on passing decisions. To this end, a sample dataset of scenario-based passing decisions is analyzed. This article shows how the effects of perceivable team positionings and athletes' knowledge about their fellow team members on passing decisions can be estimated. Ways of transfering this approach to real-world situations and implications for future research using more representative designs are presented.

Passing Decisions in Football: Introducing an Empirical Approach to Estimating the Effects of Perceptual Information and Associative Knowledge

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Silvan Steiner

2018-03-01

Full Text Available The importance of various information sources in decision-making in interactive team sports is debated. While some highlight the role of the perceptual information provided by the current game context, others point to the role of knowledge-based information that athletes have regarding their team environment. Recently, an integrative perspective considering the simultaneous involvement of both of these information sources in decision-making in interactive team sports has been presented. In a theoretical example concerning passing decisions, the simultaneous involvement of perceptual and knowledge-based information has been illustrated. However, no precast method of determining the contribution of these two information sources empirically has been provided. The aim of this article is to bridge this gap and present a statistical approach to estimating the effects of perceptual information and associative knowledge on passing decisions. To this end, a sample dataset of scenario-based passing decisions is analyzed. This article shows how the effects of perceivable team positionings and athletes' knowledge about their fellow team members on passing decisions can be estimated. Ways of transfering this approach to real-world situations and implications for future research using more representative designs are presented.

Visual Saliency Prediction and Evaluation across Different Perceptual Tasks.

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Shafin Rahman

Full Text Available Saliency maps produced by different algorithms are often evaluated by comparing output to fixated image locations appearing in human eye tracking data. There are challenges in evaluation based on fixation data due to bias in the data. Properties of eye movement patterns that are independent of image content may limit the validity of evaluation results, including spatial bias in fixation data. To address this problem, we present modeling and evaluation results for data derived from different perceptual tasks related to the concept of saliency. We also present a novel approach to benchmarking to deal with some of the challenges posed by spatial bias. The results presented establish the value of alternatives to fixation data to drive improvement and development of models. We also demonstrate an approach to approximate the output of alternative perceptual tasks based on computational saliency and/or eye gaze data. As a whole, this work presents novel benchmarking results and methods, establishes a new performance baseline for perceptual tasks that provide an alternative window into visual saliency, and demonstrates the capacity for saliency to serve in approximating human behaviour for one visual task given data from another.

Affective and cognitive decision-making in adolescents.

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van Duijvenvoorde, Anna C K; Jansen, Brenda R J; Visser, Ingmar; Huizenga, Hilde M

2010-01-01

Adolescents demonstrate impaired decision-making in emotionally arousing situations, yet they appear to exhibit relatively mature decision-making skills in predominantly cognitive, low-arousal situations. In this study we compared adolescents' (13-15 years) performance on matched affective and cognitive decision-making tasks, in order to determine (1) their performance level on each task and (2) whether performance on the cognitive task was associated with performance on the affective task. Both tasks required a comparison of choice dimensions characterized by frequency of loss, amount of loss, and constant gain. Results indicated that in the affective task, adolescents performed sub-optimally by considering only the frequency of loss, whereas in the cognitive task adolescents used relatively mature decision rules by considering two or all three choice dimensions. Performance on the affective task was not related to performance on the cognitive task. These results are discussed in light of neural developmental trajectories observed in adolescence.

Implications of Decision Making Research for Decision Support and Displays

OpenAIRE

Morrison, Jeffrey G.; Kelly, Richard T.; Moore, Ronald A.; Hutchins, Susan G.

1998-01-01

To appear in J. A. Cannon-Bowers & E. Salas (Eds.), Decision Making Under Stress: Implications for Training and Simulation. A prototype decision support system (DSS) was developed to enhance Navy tactical decision making based on naturalistic decision processes. Displays were developed to support critical decision making tasks through recognition-primed and explanation-based reasoning processes, and cognitive analysis was conducted of the decision making problems faced by Navy ...

Striatal activation reflects urgency in perceptual decision making

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Maanen, L.; Fontanesi, L.; Hawkins, G.E.; Forstmann, B.U.

2016-01-01

Deciding between multiple courses of action often entails an increasing need to do something as time passes - a sense of urgency. This notion of urgency is not incorporated in standard theories of speeded decision making that assume information is accumulated until a critical fixed threshold is

A discrimination task used as a novel method of testing decision-making behavior following traumatic brain injury.

Science.gov (United States)

Martens, Kris M; Vonder Haar, Cole; Hutsell, Blake A; Hoane, Michael R

2012-10-10

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) results in a multitude of deficits following injury. Some of the most pervasive in humans are the changes that affect frontally-mediated cognitive functioning, such as decision making. The assessment of decision-making behavior in rodents has been extensively tested in the field of the experimental analysis of behavior. However, due to the narrow therapeutic window following TBI, time-intensive operant paradigms are rarely incorporated into the battery of tests traditionally used, the majority of which assess motor and sensory functioning. The cognitive measures that are used are frequently limited to memory and do not account for changes in decision-making behavior. The purpose of the present study was to develop a simplified discrimination task that can assess deficits in decision-making behavior in rodents. For the task, rats were required to dig in cocoa-scented sand (versus unscented sand) for a reinforcer. Rats were given 12 sessions per day until a criterion level of 80% accuracy for 3 days straight was reached. Once the criterion was achieved, cortical contusion injuries were induced (frontal, parietal, or sham). Following a recovery period, the rats were re-tested on cocoa versus unscented sand. Upon reaching criterion, a reversal discrimination was evaluated in which the reinforcer was placed in unscented sand. Finally, a novel scent discrimination (basil versus coffee with basil reinforced), and a reversal (coffee) were evaluated. The results indicated that the Dig task is a simple experimental preparation that can be used to assess deficits in decision-making behavior following TBI.

Emotion-based decision-making in healthy subjects: short-term effects of reducing dopamine levels.

Science.gov (United States)

Sevy, Serge; Hassoun, Youssef; Bechara, Antoine; Yechiam, Eldad; Napolitano, Barbara; Burdick, Katherine; Delman, Howard; Malhotra, Anil

2006-10-01

Converging evidences from animal and human studies suggest that addiction is associated with dopaminergic dysfunction in brain reward circuits. So far, it is unclear what aspects of addictive behaviors are related to a dopaminergic dysfunction. We hypothesize that a decrease in dopaminergic activity impairs emotion-based decision-making. To demonstrate this hypothesis, we investigated the effects of a decrease in dopaminergic activity on the performance of an emotion-based decision-making task, the Iowa gambling task (IGT), in 11 healthy human subjects. We used a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject design to examine the effect of a mixture containing the branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) valine, isoleucine and leucine on prolactin, IGT performance, perceptual competency and visual aspects of visuospatial working memory, visual attention and working memory, and verbal memory. The expectancy-valence model was used to determine the relative contributions of distinct IGT components (attention to past outcomes, relative weight of wins and losses, and choice strategies) in the decision-making process. Compared to placebo, the BCAA mixture increased prolactin levels and impaired IGT performance. BCAA administration interfered with a particular component process of decision-making related to attention to more recent events as compared to more distant events. There were no differences between placebo and BCAA conditions for other aspects of cognition. Our results suggest a direct link between a reduced dopaminergic activity and poor emotion-based decision-making characterized by shortsightedness, and thus difficulties resisting short-term reward, despite long-term negative consequences. These findings have implications for behavioral and pharmacological interventions targeting impaired emotion-based decision-making in addictive disorders.

Monetary reward modulates task-irrelevant perceptual learning for invisible stimuli.

Science.gov (United States)

Pascucci, David; Mastropasqua, Tommaso; Turatto, Massimo

2015-01-01

Task Irrelevant Perceptual Learning (TIPL) shows that the brain's discriminative capacity can improve also for invisible and unattended visual stimuli. It has been hypothesized that this form of "unconscious" neural plasticity is mediated by an endogenous reward mechanism triggered by the correct task performance. Although this result has challenged the mandatory role of attention in perceptual learning, no direct evidence exists of the hypothesized link between target recognition, reward and TIPL. Here, we manipulated the reward value associated with a target to demonstrate the involvement of reinforcement mechanisms in sensory plasticity for invisible inputs. Participants were trained in a central task associated with either high or low monetary incentives, provided only at the end of the experiment, while subliminal stimuli were presented peripherally. Our results showed that high incentive-value targets induced a greater degree of perceptual improvement for the subliminal stimuli, supporting the role of reinforcement mechanisms in TIPL.

Mental fatigue impairs soccer-specific decision-making skill

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Smith, Mitchell R.; Zeuwts, Linus; Lenoir, Matthieu; Hens, Nathalie; De Jong, Laura M. S.; Coutts, Aaron J.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of mental fatigue on soccer-specific decision-making. Twelve well-trained male soccer players performed a soccer-specific decision-making task on two occasions, separated by at least 72 h. The decision-making task was preceded in a randomised order by 30

The Effects of Stress and Executive Functions on Decision Making in an Executive Parallel Task

OpenAIRE

McGuigan, Brian

2016-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of acute stress on parallel task performance with the Game of Dice Task (GDT) to measure decision making and the Stroop test.  Two previous studies have found that the combination of stress and a parallel task with the GDT and an executive functions task preserved performance on the GDT for a stress group compared to a control group.  The purpose of this study was to create and use a new parallel task with the GDT and the stroop test to elu...

Effects of Information Visualization on Older Adults' Decision-Making Performance in a Medicare Plan Selection Task: A Comparative Usability Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Price, Margaux M; Crumley-Branyon, Jessica J; Leidheiser, William R; Pak, Richard

2016-06-01

Technology gains have improved tools for evaluating complex tasks by providing environmental supports (ES) that increase ease of use and improve performance outcomes through the use of information visualizations (info-vis). Complex info-vis emphasize the need to understand individual differences in abilities of target users, the key cognitive abilities needed to execute a decision task, and the graphical elements that can serve as the most effective ES. Older adults may be one such target user group that would benefit from increased ES to mitigate specific declines in cognitive abilities. For example, choosing a prescription drug plan is a necessary and complex task that can impact quality of life if the wrong choice is made. The decision to enroll in one plan over another can involve comparing over 15 plans across many categories. Within this context, the large amount of complex information and reduced working memory capacity puts older adults' decision making at a disadvantage. An intentionally designed ES, such as an info-vis that reduces working memory demand, may assist older adults in making the most effective decision among many options. The objective of this study is to examine whether the use of an info-vis can lower working memory demands and positively affect complex decision-making performance of older adults in the context of choosing a Medicare prescription drug plan. Participants performed a computerized decision-making task in the context of finding the best health care plan. Data included quantitative decision-making performance indicators and surveys examining previous history with purchasing insurance. Participants used a colored info-vis ES or a table (no ES) to perform the decision task. Task difficulty was manipulated by increasing the number of selection criteria used to make an accurate decision. A repeated measures analysis was performed to examine differences between the two table designs. Twenty-three older adults between the ages of 66

Adaptive decision making in a dynamic environment: a test of a sequential sampling model of relative judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Vuckovic, Anita; Kwantes, Peter J; Neal, Andrew

2013-09-01

Research has identified a wide range of factors that influence performance in relative judgment tasks. However, the findings from this research have been inconsistent. Studies have varied with respect to the identification of causal variables and the perceptual and decision-making mechanisms underlying performance. Drawing on the ecological rationality approach, we present a theory of the judgment and decision-making processes involved in a relative judgment task that explains how people judge a stimulus and adapt their decision process to accommodate their own uncertainty associated with those judgments. Undergraduate participants performed a simulated air traffic control conflict detection task. Across two experiments, we systematically manipulated variables known to affect performance. In the first experiment, we manipulated the relative distances of aircraft to a common destination while holding aircraft speeds constant. In a follow-up experiment, we introduced a direct manipulation of relative speed. We then fit a sequential sampling model to the data, and used the best fitting parameters to infer the decision-making processes responsible for performance. Findings were consistent with the theory that people adapt to their own uncertainty by adjusting their criterion and the amount of time they take to collect evidence in order to make a more accurate decision. From a practical perspective, the paper demonstrates that one can use a sequential sampling model to understand performance in a dynamic environment, allowing one to make sense of and interpret complex patterns of empirical findings that would otherwise be difficult to interpret using standard statistical analyses. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Inactivation of the prelimbic or infralimbic cortex impairs decision-making in the rat gambling task.

Science.gov (United States)

Zeeb, Fiona D; Baarendse, P J J; Vanderschuren, L J M J; Winstanley, Catharine A

2015-12-01

Studies employing the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) demonstrated that areas of the frontal cortex, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), are involved in the decision-making process. However, the precise role of these regions in maintaining optimal choice is not clear. We used the rat gambling task (rGT), a rodent analogue of the IGT, to determine whether inactivation of or altered dopamine signalling within discrete cortical sub-regions disrupts decision-making. Following training on the rGT, animals were implanted with guide cannulae aimed at the prelimbic (PrL) or infralimbic (IL) cortices, the OFC, or the ACC. Prior to testing, rats received an infusion of saline or a combination of baclofen and muscimol (0.125 μg of each/side) to inactivate the region and an infusion of a dopamine D2 receptor antagonist (0, 0.1, 0.3, and 1.0 μg/side). Rats tended to increase their choice of a disadvantageous option and decrease their choice of the optimal option following inactivation of either the IL or PrL cortex. In contrast, OFC or ACC inactivation did not affect decision-making. Infusion of a dopamine D2 receptor antagonist into any sub-region did not alter choice preference. Online activity of the IL or PrL cortex is important for maintaining an optimal decision-making strategy, but optimal performance on the rGT does not require frontal cortex dopamine D2 receptor activation. Additionally, these results demonstrate that the roles of different cortical regions in cost-benefit decision-making may be dissociated using the rGT.

Working memory does not dissociate between different perceptual categorization tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Lewandowsky, Stephan; Yang, Lee-Xieng; Newell, Ben R; Kalish, Michael L

2012-07-01

Working memory is crucial for many higher level cognitive functions, ranging from mental arithmetic to reasoning and problem solving. Likewise, the ability to learn and categorize novel concepts forms an indispensable part of human cognition. However, very little is known about the relationship between working memory and categorization. This article reports 2 studies that related people's working memory capacity (WMC) to their learning performance on multiple rule-based and information-integration perceptual categorization tasks. In both studies, structural equation modeling revealed a strong relationship between WMC and category learning irrespective of the requirement to integrate information across multiple perceptual dimensions. WMC was also uniformly related to people's ability to focus on the most task-appropriate strategy, regardless of whether or not that strategy involved information integration. Contrary to the predictions of the multiple systems view of categorization, working memory thus appears to underpin performance in both major classes of perceptual category-learning tasks. 2012 APA, all rights reserved

Monetary reward modulates task-irrelevant perceptual learning for invisible stimuli.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David Pascucci

Full Text Available Task Irrelevant Perceptual Learning (TIPL shows that the brain's discriminative capacity can improve also for invisible and unattended visual stimuli. It has been hypothesized that this form of "unconscious" neural plasticity is mediated by an endogenous reward mechanism triggered by the correct task performance. Although this result has challenged the mandatory role of attention in perceptual learning, no direct evidence exists of the hypothesized link between target recognition, reward and TIPL. Here, we manipulated the reward value associated with a target to demonstrate the involvement of reinforcement mechanisms in sensory plasticity for invisible inputs. Participants were trained in a central task associated with either high or low monetary incentives, provided only at the end of the experiment, while subliminal stimuli were presented peripherally. Our results showed that high incentive-value targets induced a greater degree of perceptual improvement for the subliminal stimuli, supporting the role of reinforcement mechanisms in TIPL.

Assessing Affective and Deliberative Decision-Making: Adaptation of the Columbia Card Task to Brazilian Portuguese.

Science.gov (United States)

Kluwe-Schiavon, Bruno; Sanvicente-Vieira, Breno; Viola, Thiago W; Veiga, Eduardo; Bortolotto, Vanessa; Grassi-Oliveira, Rodrigo

2015-11-20

The ability to predict reward and punishment is essential for decision-making and the ability to learn about an ever-changing environment. Therefore, efforts have been made in understanding the mechanisms underlying decision-making, especially regarding how affective and deliberative processes interact with risk behavior. To adapt to Brazilian Portuguese the Columbia Card Task (CCT) and investigate affective and deliberative processes involved in decision-making. This study had two main phases: (1) a transcultural adaptation and (2) a pilot study. The feedback manipulation among the three conditions of CCT had an effect on the risk-taking level (p accounting for 17% of the variance. The Brazilian CCT performs well and is a versatile method for the assessment of affective and deliberative decision-making under risk according to different feedback manipulation scenarios. This study goes further, comparing electrodermal activity during hot and warm conditions and addressing an advantageous level index analysis to asses deliberative processing.

Is There Neural Evidence for an Evidence Accumulation Process in Memory Decisions?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Vugt, Marieke K; Beulen, Marijke A; Taatgen, Niels A

2016-01-01

Models of evidence accumulation have been very successful at describing human decision making behavior. Recent years have also seen the first reports of neural correlates of this accumulation process. However, these studies have mostly focused on perceptual decision making tasks, ignoring the role

Impaired decision making among morbidly obese adults.

LENUS (Irish Health Repository)

Brogan, Amy

2011-02-01

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) measures affective decision making and has revealed decision making impairments across a wide range of eating disorders. This study aimed to investigate affective decision making in severely obese individuals.

Affective Biases and Heuristics in Decision Making : Emotion regulation as a factor for decision making competence

OpenAIRE

Hagman, William

2013-01-01

Stanovich and West (2008) explored if measures of cognitive ability ignored some important aspects of thinking itself, namely that cognitive ability alone is not enough to generally prevent biased thinking. In this thesis a series of decision making (DM) tasks is tested to see if emotion regulation (ER) is a factor for the decision process and therefore should be a measured in decision making competence. A set of DM tasks was compiled involving both affective and cognitive dimensions. 400 par...

Improving children's affective decision making in the Children's Gambling Task.

Science.gov (United States)

Andrews, Glenda; Moussaumai, Jennifer

2015-11-01

Affective decision making was examined in 108 children (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) using the Children's Gambling Task (CGT). Children completed the CGT and then responded to awareness questions. Children in the binary_experience and binary_experience+awareness (not control) conditions first completed two simpler versions. Children in the binary_experience+awareness condition also responded to questions about relational components of the simpler versions. Experience with simpler versions facilitated decision making in 4- and 5-year-olds, but 3-year-olds' advantageous choices declined across trial blocks in the binary_experience and control conditions. Responding to questions about relational components further benefited the 4- and 5-year-olds. The 3-year-olds' advantageous choices on the final block were at chance level in the binary_experience+awareness condition but were below chance level in the other conditions. Awareness following the CGT was strongly correlated with advantageous choices and with age. Awareness was demonstrated by 5-year-olds (all conditions) and 4-year-olds (binary_experience and binary_experience+awareness) but not by 3-year-olds. The findings demonstrate the importance of complexity and conscious awareness in cognitive development. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The fate of task-irrelevant visual motion: perceptual load versus feature-based attention.

Science.gov (United States)

Taya, Shuichiro; Adams, Wendy J; Graf, Erich W; Lavie, Nilli

2009-11-18

We tested contrasting predictions derived from perceptual load theory and from recent feature-based selection accounts. Observers viewed moving, colored stimuli and performed low or high load tasks associated with one stimulus feature, either color or motion. The resultant motion aftereffect (MAE) was used to evaluate attentional allocation. We found that task-irrelevant visual features received less attention than co-localized task-relevant features of the same objects. Moreover, when color and motion features were co-localized yet perceived to belong to two distinct surfaces, feature-based selection was further increased at the expense of object-based co-selection. Load theory predicts that the MAE for task-irrelevant motion would be reduced with a higher load color task. However, this was not seen for co-localized features; perceptual load only modulated the MAE for task-irrelevant motion when this was spatially separated from the attended color location. Our results suggest that perceptual load effects are mediated by spatial selection and do not generalize to the feature domain. Feature-based selection operates to suppress processing of task-irrelevant, co-localized features, irrespective of perceptual load.

Effects of musicianship and experimental task on perceptual segmentation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hartmann, Martin; Lartillot, Olivier; Toiviainen, Petri

2015-01-01

-linear fuzzy integration of basic and interaction descriptors of local musical novelty. We found that musicianship of listeners and segmentation task had an effect on model prediction rate, dimensionality and components. Changes in tonality and rhythm, as well as simultaneous change of these aspects were......The perceptual structure of music is a fundamental issue in music psychology that can be systematically addressed via computational models. This study estimated the contribution of spectral, rhythmic and tonal descriptors for prediction of perceptual segmentation across stimuli. In a real-time task......, 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians indicated perceived instants of significant change for six ongoing musical stimuli. In a second task, 18 musicians parsed the same stimuli using audio editing software to provide non-real-time segmentation annotations. We built computational models based on a non...

The Salience Network and Its Functional Architecture in a Perceptual Decision: An Effective Connectivity Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Lamichhane, Bidhan; Dhamala, Mukesh

2015-08-01

The anterior insulae (INSs) are involved in accumulating sensory evidence in perceptual decision-making independent of the motor response, whereas the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is known to play a role in choosing appropriate behavioral responses. Recent evidence suggests that INSs and dACC are part of the salience network (SN), a key network known to be involved in decision-making and thought to be important for the coordination of behavioral responses. However, how these nodes in the SN contribute to the decision-making process from segregation of stimuli to the generation of an appropriate behavioral response remains unknown. In this study, the authors scanned 33 participants in functional magnetic resonance imaging and asked them to decide whether the presented pairs of audio (a beep of sound) and visual (a flash of light) stimuli were synchronous or asynchronous. Participants reported their perception with a button press. Stimuli were presented in block of eight pairs with a temporal lag (ΔT) between the first (audio) and the second (visual) stimulus in each pair. They used dynamic causal modeling (DCM) and the Bayesian model evidence technique to elucidate the functional architecture between the nodes of SN. Both the synchrony and the asynchrony perception resulted in strong activation in the SN. Most importantly, the DCM analyses demonstrated that the INSs were integrating as well as driving hubs in the SN. The INSs were found to a play an important role in the integration of sensory information; input to the SN is most likely through INSs. Furthermore, significant INSs to dACC intrinsic connectivity established by these task conditions help us conclude that INSs drive the dACC to guide the behavior of choosing the appropriate response. The authors therefore argue that the dACC and INS are part of a system involved in the decision-making process from perception to planning of a motor response, and that this observed functional mechanism might

Working-Memory Load and Temporal Myopia in Dynamic Decision Making

Science.gov (United States)

Worthy, Darrell A.; Otto, A. Ross; Maddox, W. Todd

2012-01-01

We examined the role of working memory (WM) in dynamic decision making by having participants perform decision-making tasks under single-task or dual-task conditions. In 2 experiments participants performed dynamic decision-making tasks in which they chose 1 of 2 options on each trial. The decreasing option always gave a larger immediate reward…

Evaluative pressure overcomes perceptual load effects.

Science.gov (United States)

Normand, Alice; Autin, Frédérique; Croizet, Jean-Claude

2015-06-01

Perceptual load has been found to be a powerful bottom-up determinant of distractibility, with high perceptual load preventing distraction by any irrelevant information. However, when under evaluative pressure, individuals exert top-down attentional control by giving greater weight to task-relevant features, making them more distractible from task-relevant distractors. One study tested whether the top-down modulation of attention under evaluative pressure overcomes the beneficial bottom-up effect of high perceptual load on distraction. Using a response-competition task, we replicated previous findings that high levels of perceptual load suppress task-relevant distractor response interference, but only for participants in a control condition. Participants under evaluative pressure (i.e., who believed their intelligence was assessed) showed interference from task-relevant distractor at all levels of perceptual load. This research challenges the assumptions of the perceptual load theory and sheds light on a neglected determinant of distractibility: the self-relevance of the performance situation in which attentional control is solicited.

The use of a cognitive task analysis-based multimedia program to teach surgical decision making in flexor tendon repair.

Science.gov (United States)

Luker, Kali R; Sullivan, Maura E; Peyre, Sarah E; Sherman, Randy; Grunwald, Tiffany

2008-01-01

The aim of this study was to compare the surgical knowledge of residents before and after receiving a cognitive task analysis-based multimedia teaching module. Ten plastic surgery residents were evaluated performing flexor tendon repair on 3 occasions. Traditional learning occurred between the first and second trial and served as the control. A teaching module was introduced as an intervention between the second and third trial using cognitive task analysis to illustrate decision-making skills. All residents showed improvement in their decision-making ability when performing flexor tendon repair after each surgical procedure. The group improved through traditional methods as well as exposure to our talk-aloud protocol (P > .01). After being trained using the cognitive task analysis curriculum the group displayed a statistically significant knowledge expansion (P multimedia surgical curriculum instruction achieved greater command of problem solving and are better equipped to make correct decisions in flexor tendon repair.

Mechanisms Underlying Decision-Making as Revealed by Deep-Brain Stimulation in Patients with Parkinson's Disease.

Science.gov (United States)

Herz, Damian M; Little, Simon; Pedrosa, David J; Tinkhauser, Gerd; Cheeran, Binith; Foltynie, Tom; Bogacz, Rafal; Brown, Peter

2018-04-23

To optimally balance opposing demands of speed and accuracy during decision-making, we must flexibly adapt how much evidence we require before making a choice. Such adjustments in decision thresholds have been linked to the subthalamic nucleus (STN), and therapeutic STN deep-brain stimulation (DBS) has been shown to interfere with this function. Here, we performed continuous as well as closed-loop DBS of the STN while Parkinson's disease patients performed a perceptual decision-making task. Closed-loop STN DBS allowed temporally patterned STN stimulation and simultaneous recordings of STN activity. This revealed that DBS only affected patients' ability to adjust decision thresholds if applied in a specific temporally confined time window during deliberation. Only stimulation in that window diminished the normal slowing of response times that occurred on difficult trials when DBS was turned off. Furthermore, DBS eliminated a relative, time-specific increase in STN beta oscillations and compromised its functional relationship with trial-by-trial adjustments in decision thresholds. Together, these results provide causal evidence that the STN is involved in adjusting decision thresholds in distinct, time-limited processing windows during deliberation. Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Does future-oriented thinking predict adolescent decision making?

Science.gov (United States)

Eskritt, Michelle; Doucette, Jesslyn; Robitaille, Lori

2014-01-01

A number of theorists, as well as plain common sense, suggest that future-oriented thinking (FOT) should be involved in decision making; therefore, the development of FOT should be related to better quality decision making. FOT and quality of the decision making were measured in adolescents as well as adults in 2 different experiments. Though the results of the first experiment revealed an increase in quality of decision making across adolescence into adulthood, there was no relationship between FOT and decision making. In the second experiment, FOT predicted performance on a more deliberative decision-making task independent of age, but not performance on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Performance on the IGT was instead related to emotion regulation. The study's findings suggest that FOT can be related to reflective decision making but not necessarily decision making that is more intuitive.

Effects of prior knowledge on decisions made under perceptual vs. categorical uncertainty

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kathleen eHansen

2012-11-01

Full Text Available Humans use prior knowledge to bias decisions made under uncertainty. In this fMRI study we predicted that different brain dynamics play a role when prior knowledge is added to decisions made under perceptual vs. categorical uncertainty. Subjects decided whether shapes belonged to Category S – smoother – or Category B – bumpier – under both uncertainty conditions, with or without prior knowledge cues. When present, the prior knowledge cue, 80/20 or 50/50, indicated that 80% and 20% (or 50% and 50% were the chances that responding "S" and "B" (or vice versa would be correct. During perceptual uncertainty, shapes were degraded with noise. During categorical uncertainty, shapes were ambiguous. Adding the 80/20 cue increased activation during perceptual uncertainty in bilateral lateral occipital cortex and left middle frontal gyrus (MidFG, and decreased activity in bilateral lateral occipital cortex during categorical uncertainty. Right MidFG and other frontoparietal regions were active in all conditions. The results demonstrate that left MidFG shows activation changes, suggestive of an influence on visual cortex, that depend on the factor that makes the decisions difficult. When sensory evidence is difficult to perceive, prior knowledge increases visual cortical activity. When the sensory evidence is easy to perceive but difficult to interpret, prior knowledge decreases visual cortical activity.

Impaired decision-making under risk in individuals with alcohol dependence

Science.gov (United States)

Brevers, Damien; Bechara, Antoine; Cleeremans, Axel; Kornreich, Charles; Verbanck, Paul; Noël, Xavier

2014-01-01

Background Alcohol dependence is associated with poor decision-making under ambiguity, that is, when decisions are to be made in the absence of known probabilities of reward and loss. However, little is known regarding decisions made by individuals with alcohol dependence in the context of known probabilities (decision under risk). In this study, we investigated the relative contribution of these distinct aspects of decision making to alcohol dependence. Methods Thirty recently detoxified and sober asymptomatic alcohol-dependent individuals, and thirty healthy control participants were tested for decision-making under ambiguity (using the Iowa Gambling Task), and decision-making under-risk (using the Cups Task and Coin Flipping Task). We also tested their capacities for working memory storage (Digit-span Forward), and dual-tasking (Operation-span Task). Results Compared to healthy control participants, alcohol-dependent individuals made disadvantageous decisions on the Iowa Gambling Task, reflecting poor decisions under ambiguity. They also made more risky choices on the Cups and Coin Flipping Tasks reflecting poor decision-making under risk. In addition, alcohol-dependent participants showed some working memory impairments, as measured by the dual tasking, and the degree of this impairment correlated with high-risk decision-making, thus suggesting a relationship between processes sub-serving working memory and risky decisions. Conclusion These results suggest that alcohol dependent individuals are impaired in their ability to decide optimally in multiple facets of uncertainty (i.e., both risk and ambiguity), and that at least some aspects of these deficits are linked to poor working memory processes. PMID:24948198

The role of consciousness in cognitive control and decision making

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Simon evan Gaal

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Here we review studies on the complexity and strength of unconscious information processing. We focus on empirical evidence that relates awareness of information to cognitive control processes (e.g. response inhibition, conflict resolution, and task-switching, the life-time of information maintenance (e.g. working memory and the possibility to integrate multiple pieces of information across space and time. Overall, the results that we review paint a picture of local and specific effects of unconscious information on various (high-level brain regions, including areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although this neural activation does not elicit any conscious experience, it is functional and capable of influencing many perceptual, cognitive (control and decision-related processes, sometimes even for relatively long periods of time. However, recent evidence also points out interesting dissociations between conscious and unconscious information processing when it comes to the duration, flexibility and the strategic use of that information for complex operations and decision-making. Based on the available evidence, we conclude that the role of task-relevance of subliminal information and meta-cognitive factors in unconscious cognition need more attention in future work.

Learning affects top down and bottom up modulation of eye movements in decision making

OpenAIRE

Jacob L. Orquin; Martin P. Bagger; Simone Mueller Loose

2013-01-01

Repeated decision making is subject to changes over time such as decreases in decision time and information use and increases in decision accuracy. We show that a traditional strategy selection view of decision making cannot account for these temporal dynamics without relaxing main assumptions about what defines a decision strategy. As an alternative view we suggest that temporal dynamics in decision making are driven by attentional and perceptual processes and that this view has been express...

Decision making in healthy participants on the Iowa Gambling Task: new insights from an operant approach.

Science.gov (United States)

Bull, Peter N; Tippett, Lynette J; Addis, Donna Rose

2015-01-01

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has contributed greatly to the study of affective decision making. However, researchers have observed high inter-study and inter-individual variability in IGT performance in healthy participants, and many are classified as impaired using standard criteria. Additionally, while decision-making deficits are often attributed to atypical sensitivity to reward and/or punishment, the IGT lacks an integrated sensitivity measure. Adopting an operant perspective, two experiments were conducted to explore these issues. In Experiment 1, 50 healthy participants completed a 200-trial version of the IGT which otherwise closely emulated Bechara et al.'s (1999) original computer task. Group data for Trials 1-100 closely replicated Bechara et al.'s original findings of high net scores and preferences for advantageous decks, suggesting that implementations that depart significantly from Bechara's standard IGT contribute to inter-study variability. During Trials 101-200, mean net scores improved significantly and the percentage of participants meeting the "impaired" criterion was halved. An operant-style stability criterion applied to individual data revealed this was likely related to individual differences in learning rate. Experiment 2 used a novel operant card task-the Auckland Card Task (ACT)-to derive quantitative estimates of sensitivity using the generalized matching law. Relative to individuals who mastered the IGT, persistent poor performers on the IGT exhibited significantly lower sensitivity to magnitudes (but not frequencies) of rewards and punishers on the ACT. Overall, our findings demonstrate the utility of operant-style analysis of IGT data and the potential of applying operant concurrent-schedule procedures to the study of human decision making.

Differences in perceptual learning transfer as a function of training task.

Science.gov (United States)

Green, C Shawn; Kattner, Florian; Siegel, Max H; Kersten, Daniel; Schrater, Paul R

2015-01-01

A growing body of research--including results from behavioral psychology, human structural and functional imaging, single-cell recordings in nonhuman primates, and computational modeling--suggests that perceptual learning effects are best understood as a change in the ability of higher-level integration or association areas to read out sensory information in the service of particular decisions. Work in this vein has argued that, depending on the training experience, the "rules" for this read-out can either be applicable to new contexts (thus engendering learning generalization) or can apply only to the exact training context (thus resulting in learning specificity). Here we contrast learning tasks designed to promote either stimulus-specific or stimulus-general rules. Specifically, we compare learning transfer across visual orientation following training on three different tasks: an orientation categorization task (which permits an orientation-specific learning solution), an orientation estimation task (which requires an orientation-general learning solution), and an orientation categorization task in which the relevant category boundary shifts on every trial (which lies somewhere between the two tasks above). While the simple orientation-categorization training task resulted in orientation-specific learning, the estimation and moving categorization tasks resulted in significant orientation learning generalization. The general framework tested here--that task specificity or generality can be predicted via an examination of the optimal learning solution--may be useful in building future training paradigms with certain desired outcomes.

Perceptual and Conceptual Priming of Cue Encoding in Task Switching

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Schneider, Darryl W.

2016-01-01

Transition effects in task-cuing experiments can be partitioned into task switching and cue repetition effects by using multiple cues per task. In the present study, the author shows that cue repetition effects can be partitioned into perceptual and conceptual priming effects. In 2 experiments, letters or numbers in their uppercase/lowercase or…

Heuristic use of perceptual evidence leads to dissociation between performance and metacognitive sensitivity.

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Maniscalco, Brian; Peters, Megan A K; Lau, Hakwan

2016-04-01

Zylberberg et al. [Zylberberg, Barttfeld, & Sigman (Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6; 79, 2012), Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 6:79] found that confidence decisions, but not perceptual decisions, are insensitive to evidence against a selected perceptual choice. We present a signal detection theoretic model to formalize this insight, which gave rise to a counter-intuitive empirical prediction: that depending on the observer's perceptual choice, increasing task performance can be associated with decreasing metacognitive sensitivity (i.e., the trial-by-trial correspondence between confidence and accuracy). The model also provides an explanation as to why metacognitive sensitivity tends to be less than optimal in actual subjects. These predictions were confirmed robustly in a psychophysics experiment. In a second experiment we found that, in at least some subjects, the effects were replicated even under performance feedback designed to encourage optimal behavior. However, some subjects did show improvement under feedback, suggesting the tendency to ignore evidence against a selected perceptual choice may be a heuristic adopted by the perceptual decision-making system, rather than reflecting inherent biological limitations. We present a Bayesian modeling framework that explains why this heuristic strategy may be advantageous in real-world contexts.

Effects of disrupting medial prefrontal cortex GABA transmission on decision-making in a rodent gambling task.

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Paine, T A; O'Hara, A; Plaut, B; Lowes, D C

2015-05-01

Decision-making is a complex cognitive process that is mediated, in part, by subregions of the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC). Decision-making is impaired in a number of psychiatric conditions including schizophrenia. Notably, people with schizophrenia exhibit reductions in GABA function in the same PFC areas that are implicated in decision-making. For example, expression of the GABA-synthesizing enzyme GAD67 is reduced in the dorsolateral PFC of people with schizophrenia. The goal of this experiment was to determine whether disrupting cortical GABA transmission impairs decision-making using a rodent gambling task (rGT). Rats were trained on the rGT until they reached stable performance and then were implanted with guide cannulae aimed at the medial PFC. Following recovery, the effects of intra-PFC infusions of the GABAA receptor antagonist bicuculline methiodide (BMI) or the GABA synthesis inhibitor L-allylglycine (LAG) on performance on the rGT were assessed. Intracortical infusions of BMI (25 ng/μl/side), but not LAG (10 μg/μl/side), altered decision-making. Following BMI infusions, rats made fewer advantageous choices. Follow-up experiments suggested that the change in decision-making was due to a change in the sensitivity to the punishments, rather than a change in the sensitivity to reward magnitudes, associated with each outcome. LAG infusions increased premature responding, a measure of response inhibition, but did not affect decision-making. Blocking GABAA receptors, but not inhibiting cortical GABA synthesis, within the medial PFC affects decision-making in the rGT. These data provide proof-of-concept evidence that disruptions in GABA transmission can contribute to the decision-making deficits in schizophrenia.

Does interaction matter? Testing whether a confidence heuristic can replace interaction in collective decision-making.

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Bang, Dan; Fusaroli, Riccardo; Tylén, Kristian; Olsen, Karsten; Latham, Peter E; Lau, Jennifer Y F; Roepstorff, Andreas; Rees, Geraint; Frith, Chris D; Bahrami, Bahador

2014-05-01

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the 'confidence heuristic'. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Decision making in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.

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Labudda, Kirsten; Frigge, Kristina; Horstmann, Simone; Aengenendt, Joerg; Woermann, Friedrich G; Ebner, Alois; Markowitsch, Hans J; Brand, Matthias

2009-01-01

The mesiotemporal lobe is involved in decision making processes because bilateral amygdala damage can cause impairments in decision making that is mainly based on the processing of emotional feedback. In addition to executive functions, previous studies have suggested the involvement of feedback processing in decision making under risk when explicit information about consequences and their probabilities is provided. In the current study, we investigated whether unilateral mesiotemporal damage, comprising of the hippocampus and/or the amygdala, results in alterations of both kinds of decision making. For this purpose, we preoperatively examined 20 patients with refractory unilateral mesiotemporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and a comparison group (CG) of 20 healthy volunteers with the Iowa Gambling Task to assess decision making based on feedback processing, the Game of Dice Task to assess decision making under risk, and with a neuropsychological test battery. Results indicate that TLE patients performed normally in decision making under risk, but can exhibit disturbances in decision making on the Iowa Gambling Task. A subgroup analysis revealed that those patients with a preference for the disadvantageous alternatives performed worse on executive subcomponents and had seizure onset at an earlier age in comparison to the patient subgroup without disadvantageous decision making. Furthermore, disadvantageous decision making can emerge in patients with selective hippocampal sclerosis not extended to the amygdala. Thus, our results demonstrate for the first time that presurgical patients with TLE can have selective reductions in decision making and that these deficits can result from hippocampal lesions without structural amygdala abnormalities.

Does improved decision-making ability reduce the physiological demands of game-based activities in field sport athletes?

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Gabbett, Tim J; Carius, Josh; Mulvey, Mike

2008-11-01

This study investigated the effects of video-based perceptual training on pattern recognition and pattern prediction ability in elite field sport athletes and determined whether enhanced perceptual skills influenced the physiological demands of game-based activities. Sixteen elite women soccer players (mean +/- SD age, 18.3 +/- 2.8 years) were allocated to either a video-based perceptual training group (N = 8) or a control group (N = 8). The video-based perceptual training group watched video footage of international women's soccer matches. Twelve training sessions, each 15 minutes in duration, were conducted during a 4-week period. Players performed assessments of speed (5-, 10-, and 20-m sprint), repeated-sprint ability (6 x 20-m sprints, with active recovery on a 15-second cycle), estimated maximal aerobic power (V O2 max, multistage fitness test), and a game-specific video-based perceptual test of pattern recognition and pattern prediction before and after the 4 weeks of video-based perceptual training. The on-field assessments included time-motion analysis completed on all players during a standardized 45-minute small-sided training game, and assessments of passing, shooting, and dribbling decision-making ability. No significant changes were detected in speed, repeated-sprint ability, or estimated V O2 max during the training period. However, video-based perceptual training improved decision accuracy and reduced the number of recall errors, indicating improved game awareness and decision-making ability. Importantly, the improvements in pattern recognition and prediction ability transferred to on-field improvements in passing, shooting, and dribbling decision-making skills. No differences were detected between groups for the time spent standing, walking, jogging, striding, and sprinting during the small-sided training game. These findings demonstrate that video-based perceptual training can be used effectively to enhance the decision-making ability of field

Rule-based decision making model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sirola, Miki

1998-01-01

A rule-based decision making model is designed in G2 environment. A theoretical and methodological frame for the model is composed and motivated. The rule-based decision making model is based on object-oriented modelling, knowledge engineering and decision theory. The idea of safety objective tree is utilized. Advanced rule-based methodologies are applied. A general decision making model 'decision element' is constructed. The strategy planning of the decision element is based on e.g. value theory and utility theory. A hypothetical process model is built to give input data for the decision element. The basic principle of the object model in decision making is division in tasks. Probability models are used in characterizing component availabilities. Bayes' theorem is used to recalculate the probability figures when new information is got. The model includes simple learning features to save the solution path. A decision analytic interpretation is given to the decision making process. (author)

Elapsed decision time affects the weighting of prior probability in a perceptual decision task

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Hanks, Timothy D.; Mazurek, Mark E.; Kiani, Roozbeh; Hopp, Elizabeth; Shadlen, Michael N.

2012-01-01

Decisions are often based on a combination of new evidence with prior knowledge of the probable best choice. Optimal combination requires knowledge about the reliability of evidence, but in many realistic situations, this is unknown. Here we propose and test a novel theory: the brain exploits elapsed time during decision formation to combine sensory evidence with prior probability. Elapsed time is useful because (i) decisions that linger tend to arise from less reliable evidence, and (ii) the expected accuracy at a given decision time depends on the reliability of the evidence gathered up to that point. These regularities allow the brain to combine prior information with sensory evidence by weighting the latter in accordance with reliability. To test this theory, we manipulated the prior probability of the rewarded choice while subjects performed a reaction-time discrimination of motion direction using a range of stimulus reliabilities that varied from trial to trial. The theory explains the effect of prior probability on choice and reaction time over a wide range of stimulus strengths. We found that prior probability was incorporated into the decision process as a dynamic bias signal that increases as a function of decision time. This bias signal depends on the speed-accuracy setting of human subjects, and it is reflected in the firing rates of neurons in the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) of rhesus monkeys performing this task. PMID:21525274

Decision-Making in Multiple Sclerosis Patients: A Systematic Review

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Mireille Neuhaus

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Background. Multiple sclerosis (MS is frequently associated with cognitive and behavioural deficits. A growing number of studies suggest an impact of MS on decision-making abilities. The aim of this systematic review was to assess if (1 performance of MS patients in decision-making tasks was consistently different from controls and (2 whether this modification was associated with cognitive dysfunction and emotional alterations. Methods. The search was conducted on Pubmed/Medline database. 12 studies evaluating the difference between MS patients and healthy controls using validated decision-making tasks were included. Outcomes considered were quantitative (net scores and qualitative measurements (deliberation time and learning from feedback. Results. Quantitative and qualitative decision-making impairment in MS was present in 64.7% of measurements. Patients were equally impaired in tasks for decision-making under risk and ambiguity. A correlation to other cognitive functions was present in 50% of cases, with the highest associations in the domains of processing speed and attentional capacity. Conclusions. In MS patients, qualitative and quantitative modifications may be present in any kind of decision-making task and can appear independently of other cognitive measures. Since decision-making abilities have a significant impact on everyday life, this cognitive aspect has an influential importance in various MS-related treatment settings.

Decision-Making in Multiple Sclerosis Patients: A Systematic Review.

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Neuhaus, Mireille; Calabrese, Pasquale; Annoni, Jean-Marie

2018-01-01

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is frequently associated with cognitive and behavioural deficits. A growing number of studies suggest an impact of MS on decision-making abilities. The aim of this systematic review was to assess if (1) performance of MS patients in decision-making tasks was consistently different from controls and (2) whether this modification was associated with cognitive dysfunction and emotional alterations. The search was conducted on Pubmed/Medline database. 12 studies evaluating the difference between MS patients and healthy controls using validated decision-making tasks were included. Outcomes considered were quantitative (net scores) and qualitative measurements (deliberation time and learning from feedback). Quantitative and qualitative decision-making impairment in MS was present in 64.7% of measurements. Patients were equally impaired in tasks for decision-making under risk and ambiguity. A correlation to other cognitive functions was present in 50% of cases, with the highest associations in the domains of processing speed and attentional capacity. In MS patients, qualitative and quantitative modifications may be present in any kind of decision-making task and can appear independently of other cognitive measures. Since decision-making abilities have a significant impact on everyday life, this cognitive aspect has an influential importance in various MS-related treatment settings.

Limited Cognitive Resources Explain a Trade-Off between Perceptual and Metacognitive Vigilance.

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Maniscalco, Brian; McCurdy, Li Yan; Odegaard, Brian; Lau, Hakwan

2017-02-01

not yet been explored in depth. Here, we show that patterns in perceptual and metacognitive vigilance do not follow the pattern predicted by a previously suggested single-process model of perceptual and metacognitive decision making. We account for these findings by showing that regions of anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) previously associated with visual metacognition are also associated with perceptual vigilance. We also show that relieving metacognitive task demand improves perceptual vigilance, suggesting that aPFC may house a limited cognitive resource that contributes to both metacognition and perceptual vigilance. These findings advance our understanding of the mechanisms and dynamics of perceptual metacognition. Copyright © 2017 the authors 0270-6474/17/371213-12$15.00/0.

Risky Decision Making in a Laboratory Driving Task Is Associated with Health Risk Behaviors during Late Adolescence but Not Adulthood

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Kim-Spoon, Jungmeen; Kahn, Rachel; Deater-Deckard, Kirby; Chiu, Pearl; Steinberg, Laurence; King-Casas, Brooks

2016-01-01

Adolescence is characterized by increasing incidence of health risk behaviors, including experimentation with drugs and alcohol. To fill the gap in our understanding of the associations between risky decision-making and health risk behaviors, we investigated associations between laboratory-based risky decision-making using the Stoplight task and…

Dynamic excitatory and inhibitory gain modulation can produce flexible, robust and optimal decision-making.

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Ritwik K Niyogi

Full Text Available Behavioural and neurophysiological studies in primates have increasingly shown the involvement of urgency signals during the temporal integration of sensory evidence in perceptual decision-making. Neuronal correlates of such signals have been found in the parietal cortex, and in separate studies, demonstrated attention-induced gain modulation of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Although previous computational models of decision-making have incorporated gain modulation, their abstract forms do not permit an understanding of the contribution of inhibitory gain modulation. Thus, the effects of co-modulating both excitatory and inhibitory neuronal gains on decision-making dynamics and behavioural performance remain unclear. In this work, we incorporate time-dependent co-modulation of the gains of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons into our previous biologically based decision circuit model. We base our computational study in the context of two classic motion-discrimination tasks performed in animals. Our model shows that by simultaneously increasing the gains of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons, a variety of the observed dynamic neuronal firing activities can be replicated. In particular, the model can exhibit winner-take-all decision-making behaviour with higher firing rates and within a significantly more robust model parameter range. It also exhibits short-tailed reaction time distributions even when operating near a dynamical bifurcation point. The model further shows that neuronal gain modulation can compensate for weaker recurrent excitation in a decision neural circuit, and support decision formation and storage. Higher neuronal gain is also suggested in the more cognitively demanding reaction time than in the fixed delay version of the task. Using the exact temporal delays from the animal experiments, fast recruitment of gain co-modulation is shown to maximize reward rate, with a timescale that is surprisingly near the

Altered Decision-Making under Risk in Obesity.

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Juan F Navas

Full Text Available The negative consequences of energy dense foods are well known, yet people increasingly make unhealthy food choices leading to obesity (i.e., risky decisions. The aims of this study were: [1] to compare performance in decision-making tasks under risk and under ambiguity between individuals with obesity, overweight and normal weight; [2] to examine the associations between body mass index (BMI and decision-making, and the degree to which these associations are modulated by reward sensitivity.Seventy-nine adults were recruited and classified in three groups according to their BMI: obesity, overweight and normal-weight. Groups were similar in terms of age, education and socio-economic status, and were screened for comorbid medical and mental health conditions. Decision-making under risk was measured via the Wheel of Fortune Task (WoFT and decision-making under ambiguity via the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT. Reward sensitivity was indicated by the Sensitivity to Punishment and Sensitivity to Reward Questionnaire (SPSRQ.Individuals with obesity made riskier choices in the WoFT, specifically in choices with an expected value close to zero and in the propensity to risk index. No differences were found in IGT performance or SPSRQ scores. BMI was associated with risk-taking (WoFT performance, independently of reward sensitivity.Obesity is linked to a propensity to make risky decisions in experimental conditions analogous to everyday food choices.

A new computational account of cognitive control over reinforcement-based decision-making: Modeling of a probabilistic learning task.

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Zendehrouh, Sareh

2015-11-01

Recent work on decision-making field offers an account of dual-system theory for decision-making process. This theory holds that this process is conducted by two main controllers: a goal-directed system and a habitual system. In the reinforcement learning (RL) domain, the habitual behaviors are connected with model-free methods, in which appropriate actions are learned through trial-and-error experiences. However, goal-directed behaviors are associated with model-based methods of RL, in which actions are selected using a model of the environment. Studies on cognitive control also suggest that during processes like decision-making, some cortical and subcortical structures work in concert to monitor the consequences of decisions and to adjust control according to current task demands. Here a computational model is presented based on dual system theory and cognitive control perspective of decision-making. The proposed model is used to simulate human performance on a variant of probabilistic learning task. The basic proposal is that the brain implements a dual controller, while an accompanying monitoring system detects some kinds of conflict including a hypothetical cost-conflict one. The simulation results address existing theories about two event-related potentials, namely error related negativity (ERN) and feedback related negativity (FRN), and explore the best account of them. Based on the results, some testable predictions are also presented. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Parsing a perceptual decision into a sequence of moments of thought

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Martin eGraziano

2011-09-01

Full Text Available Theoretical, computational and experimental studies have converged to a model of decision-making in which sensory evidence is stochastically integrated to a threshold, implementing a shift from an analog to a discrete form of computation. Understanding how this process can be chained and sequenced - as virtually all real-life tasks involve a sequence of decisions - remains an open question in neuroscience. We reasoned that incorporating a virtual continuum of possible behavioral outcomes in a simple decision task- a fundamental ingredient of real-life decision making – should result in a progressive sequential approximation to the correct response. We used real-time tracking of motor action in a decision task, as a measure of cognitive states reflecting an internal decision process. We found that response trajectories were spontaneously segmented into a discrete sequence of explorations separated by brief stops (about 200 ms – which remained unconscious to the participants. The characteristics of these stops were indicative of a decision process - a moment of thought: their duration correlated with the difficulty of the decision and with the efficiency of the subsequent exploration. Our findings suggest that simple navigation in an abstract space involves a discrete sequence of explorations and stops and, moreover, that these stops reveal a fingerprint of moments of thought.

But I can’t pass that far! The influence of motor skill on decision making

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bruce, L.; Farrow, D.; Raynor, A.; Mann, D.L.

2012-01-01

Objectives: The influence of motor skill on perceptual-cognitive and perceptual-motor decision making has been theorised but not verified empirically. Method: Expert (n=19), developmental (n=20), and lesser-skilled netballers (n=19) completed tests designed to evaluate three different components of

Sensitivity to cognitive effort mediates psychostimulant effects on a novel rodent cost/benefit decision-making task.

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Cocker, Paul J; Hosking, Jay G; Benoit, James; Winstanley, Catharine A

2012-07-01

Amotivational states and insufficient recruitment of mental effort have been observed in a variety of clinical populations, including depression, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Previous rodent models of effort-based decision making have utilized physical costs whereas human studies of effort are primarily cognitive in nature, and it is unclear whether the two types of effortful decision making are underpinned by the same neurobiological processes. We therefore designed a novel rat cognitive effort task (rCET) based on the 5-choice serial reaction time task, a well-validated measure of attention and impulsivity. Within each trial of the rCET, rats are given the choice between an easy or hard visuospatial discrimination, and successful hard trials are rewarded with double the number of sugar pellets. Similar to previous human studies, stable individual variation in choice behavior was observed, with 'workers' choosing hard trials significantly more than their 'slacker' counterparts. Whereas workers 'slacked off' in response to administration of amphetamine and caffeine, slackers 'worked harder' under amphetamine, but not caffeine. Conversely, these stimulants increased motor impulsivity in all animals. Ethanol did not affect animals' choice but invigorated behavior. In sum, we have shown for the first time that rats are differentially sensitive to cognitive effort when making decisions, independent of other processes such as impulsivity, and these baseline differences can influence the cognitive response to psychostimulants. Such findings could inform our understanding of impairments in effort-based decision making and contribute to treatment development.

P2-16: Dual-Bound Model and the Role of Time Bound in Perceptual Decision Making

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Daeseob Lim

2012-10-01

Full Text Available The diffusion model (DM encapsulates the dynamics of perceptual decision within a ‘diffusion field’ that is defined by a basis with sensory-evidence (SE and time vectors. At the core of the DM, it assumes that a decision is not made until an evidence particle drifts in the diffusion field and eventually hits one of the two pre-fixed bounds defined in the SE axis. This assumption dictates when and which choice is made by referring to when and which bound will be hit by the evidence particle. What if urgency pressures the decision system to make a choice even when the evidence particle has yet hit the SE bound? Previous modeling attempts at coping with time pressure, despite differences in detail, all manipulated the coordinate of SE bounds. Here, we offer a novel solution by adopting another bound on the time axis. This ‘dual-bound’ model (DBM posits that decisions can also be made when the evidence particle hits a time bound, which is determined on a trial-by-trial basis by a ‘perceived time interval’ – how long the system can stay in the ‘diffusion’ field. The classic single-bound model (SBM exhibited systematic errors in predicting both the reaction time distributions and the time-varying bias in choice. Those errors were not corrected by previously proposed variants of the SBM until the time bound was introduced. The validity of the DBM was further supported by the strong across-individual correlation between observed precision of interval timing and the predicted trial-by-trial variability of the time bound.

The influence of spatiotemporal structure of noisy stimuli in decision making.

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Insabato, Andrea; Dempere-Marco, Laura; Pannunzi, Mario; Deco, Gustavo; Romo, Ranulfo

2014-04-01

Decision making is a process of utmost importance in our daily lives, the study of which has been receiving notable attention for decades. Nevertheless, the neural mechanisms underlying decision making are still not fully understood. Computational modeling has revealed itself as a valuable asset to address some of the fundamental questions. Biophysically plausible models, in particular, are useful in bridging the different levels of description that experimental studies provide, from the neural spiking activity recorded at the cellular level to the performance reported at the behavioral level. In this article, we have reviewed some of the recent progress made in the understanding of the neural mechanisms that underlie decision making. We have performed a critical evaluation of the available results and address, from a computational perspective, aspects of both experimentation and modeling that so far have eluded comprehension. To guide the discussion, we have selected a central theme which revolves around the following question: how does the spatiotemporal structure of sensory stimuli affect the perceptual decision-making process? This question is a timely one as several issues that still remain unresolved stem from this central theme. These include: (i) the role of spatiotemporal input fluctuations in perceptual decision making, (ii) how to extend the current results and models derived from two-alternative choice studies to scenarios with multiple competing evidences, and (iii) to establish whether different types of spatiotemporal input fluctuations affect decision-making outcomes in distinctive ways. And although we have restricted our discussion mostly to visual decisions, our main conclusions are arguably generalizable; hence, their possible extension to other sensory modalities is one of the points in our discussion.

Decision making in the reward and punishment variants of the iowa gambling task: evidence of "foresight" or "framing"?

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Singh, Varsha; Khan, Azizuddin

2012-01-01

Surface-level differences in the reward and punishment variants, specifically greater long-term decision making in the punishment variant of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) observed in previous studies led to the present comparison of long-term decision making in the two IGT variants (n = 320, male = 160). It was contended that risk aversion triggered by a positive frame of the reward variant and risk seeking triggered by a negative frame of the punishment variant appears as long-term decision making in the two IGT variants. Apart from the frame of the variant as a within-subjects factor (variant type: reward and punishment), the order in which the frame was triggered (order type: reward-punishment or punishment-reward), and the four types of instructions that delineated motivation toward reward from that of punishment (reward, punishment, reward and punishment, and no-hint) were hypothesized to have an effect on foresighted decision making in the IGT. As expected, long-term decision making differed across the two IGT variants suggesting that the frame of the variant has an effect on long-term decision making in the IGT (p decision making in the two IGT variants (p decision making is sensitive to reward and punishment frame in an asymmetric manner, an observation that is aligned with the behavioral decision making framework. Benefits of integrating findings from behavioral studies in decision neuroscience are discussed, and a need to investigate cultural differences in the IGT studies is pointed out.

Decision making as a window on cognition.

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Shadlen, Michael N; Kiani, Roozbeh

2013-10-30

A decision is a commitment to a proposition or plan of action based on information and values associated with the possible outcomes. The process operates in a flexible timeframe that is free from the immediacy of evidence acquisition and the real time demands of action itself. Thus, it involves deliberation, planning, and strategizing. This Perspective focuses on perceptual decision making in nonhuman primates and the discovery of neural mechanisms that support accuracy, speed, and confidence in a decision. We suggest that these mechanisms expose principles of cognitive function in general, and we speculate about the challenges and directions before the field. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Relations between mental workload and decision-making in an organizational setting

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María Soria-Oliver

2017-05-01

Full Text Available Asbtract Background The complexity of current organizations implies a potential overload for workers. For this reason, it is of interest to study the effects that mental workload has on the performance of complex tasks in professional settings. Objective The objective of this study is to empirically analyze the relation between the quality of decision-making, on the one hand, and the expected and real mental workload, on the other. Methods The study uses an ex post facto prospective design with a sample of 176 professionals from a higher education organization. Expected mental workload (Pre-Task WL and real mental workload (Post-Task WL were measured with the unweighted NASA-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX questionnaire; difference between real WL and expected WL (Differential WL was also calculated; quality of decision-making was measured by means of the Decision-Making Questionnaire. Results General quality of decision-making and Pre-Task WL relation is compatible with an inverted U pattern, with slight variations depending on the specific dimension of decision-making that is considered. There were no verifiable relations between Post-Task WL and decision-making. The subjects whose expected WL matched the real WL showed worse quality in decision-making than subjects with high or low Differential WL. Conclusions The relations between mental workload and decision-making reveal a complex pattern, with evidence of nonlinear relations.

An Integrated Decision-Making Model for Categorizing Weather Products and Decision Aids

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Elgin, Peter D.; Thomas, Rickey P.

2004-01-01

The National Airspace System s capacity will experience considerable growth in the next few decades. Weather adversely affects safe air travel. The FAA and NASA are working to develop new technologies that display weather information to support situation awareness and optimize pilot decision-making in avoiding hazardous weather. Understanding situation awareness and naturalistic decision-making is an important step in achieving this goal. Information representation and situation time stress greatly influence attentional resource allocation and working memory capacity, potentially obstructing accurate situation awareness assessments. Three naturalistic decision-making theories were integrated to provide an understanding of the levels of decision making incorporated in three operational situations and two conditions. The task characteristics associated with each phase of flight govern the level of situation awareness attained and the decision making processes utilized. Weather product s attributes and situation task characteristics combine to classify weather products according to the decision-making processes best supported. In addition, a graphical interface is described that affords intuitive selection of the appropriate weather product relative to the pilot s current flight situation.

Affective decision making under uncertainty during a plausible aviation task: an fMRI study.

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Causse, Mickaël; Péran, Patrice; Dehais, Frédéric; Caravasso, Chiara Falletta; Zeffiro, Thomas; Sabatini, Umberto; Pastor, Josette

2013-05-01

In aeronautics, plan continuation error (PCE) represents failure to revise a flight plan despite emerging evidence suggesting that it is no longer safe. Assuming that PCE may be associated with a shift from cold to hot reasoning, we hypothesized that this transition may result from a large range of strong negative emotional influences linked with the decision to abort a landing and circle for a repeat attempt, referred to as a "go-around". We investigated this hypothesis by combining functional neuroimaging with an ecologically valid aviation task performed under contextual variation in incentive and situational uncertainty. Our goal was to identify regional brain activity related to the sorts of conservative or liberal decision-making strategies engaged when participants were both exposed to a financial payoff matrix constructed to bias responses in favor of landing acceptance, while they were simultaneously experiencing maximum levels of uncertainty related to high levels of stimulus ambiguity. Combined with the observed behavioral outcomes, our neuroimaging results revealed a shift from cold to hot decision making in response to high uncertainty when participants were exposed to the financial incentive. Most notably, while we observed activity increases in response to uncertainty in many frontal regions such as dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), less overall activity was observed when the reward was combined with uncertainty. Moreover, participants with poor decision making, quantified as a lower discriminability index d', exhibited riskier behavior coupled with lower activity in the right DLPFC. These outcomes suggest a disruptive effect of biased financial incentive and high uncertainty on the rational decision-making neural network, and consequently, on decision relevance. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Visual Motor and Perceptual Task Performance in Astigmatic Students

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Erin M. Harvey

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Purpose. To determine if spectacle corrected and uncorrected astigmats show reduced performance on visual motor and perceptual tasks. Methods. Third through 8th grade students were assigned to the low refractive error control group (astigmatism < 1.00 D, myopia < 0.75 D, hyperopia < 2.50 D, and anisometropia < 1.50 D or bilateral astigmatism group (right and left eye ≥ 1.00 D based on cycloplegic refraction. Students completed the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration (VMI and Visual Perception (VMIp. Astigmats were randomly assigned to testing with/without correction and control group was tested uncorrected. Analyses compared VMI and VMIp scores for corrected and uncorrected astigmats to the control group. Results. The sample included 333 students (control group 170, astigmats tested with correction 75, and astigmats tested uncorrected 88. Mean VMI score in corrected astigmats did not differ from the control group (p=0.829. Uncorrected astigmats had lower VMI scores than the control group (p=0.038 and corrected astigmats (p=0.007. Mean VMIp scores for uncorrected (p=0.209 and corrected astigmats (p=0.124 did not differ from the control group. Uncorrected astigmats had lower mean scores than the corrected astigmats (p=0.003. Conclusions. Uncorrected astigmatism influences visual motor and perceptual task performance. Previously spectacle treated astigmats do not show developmental deficits on visual motor or perceptual tasks when tested with correction.

Pretraining Cortical Thickness Predicts Subsequent Perceptual Learning Rate in a Visual Search Task.

Science.gov (United States)

Frank, Sebastian M; Reavis, Eric A; Greenlee, Mark W; Tse, Peter U

2016-03-01

We report that preexisting individual differences in the cortical thickness of brain areas involved in a perceptual learning task predict the subsequent perceptual learning rate. Participants trained in a motion-discrimination task involving visual search for a "V"-shaped target motion trajectory among inverted "V"-shaped distractor trajectories. Motion-sensitive area MT+ (V5) was functionally identified as critical to the task: after 3 weeks of training, activity increased in MT+ during task performance, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. We computed the cortical thickness of MT+ from anatomical magnetic resonance imaging volumes collected before training started, and found that it significantly predicted subsequent perceptual learning rates in the visual search task. Participants with thicker neocortex in MT+ before training learned faster than those with thinner neocortex in that area. A similar association between cortical thickness and training success was also found in posterior parietal cortex (PPC). © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Effortful semantic decision-making boosts memory performance in older adults.

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Fu, Li; Maes, Joseph H R; Varma, Samarth; Kessels, Roy P C; Daselaar, Sander M

2017-04-01

A major concern in age-related cognitive decline is episodic memory (EM). Previous studies indicate that both resource and binding deficits contribute to EM decline. Environmental support by task manipulations encouraging stronger cognitive effort and deeper levels of processing may facilitate compensation for these two deficits. To clarify factors that can counteract age-related EM decline, we assessed effects of cognitive effort (four levels) and level of processing (LoP, shallow/deep) during encoding on subsequent retrieval. Young (YAs, N = 23) and older (OAs, N = 23) adults performed two incidental encoding tasks, deep/semantic and shallow/perceptual. Cognitive effort was manipulated by varying decision-making demands. EM performance, indexed by d-prime, was later tested using a recognition task. Results showed that regardless of LoP, increased cognitive effort caused higher d-primes in both age groups. Compared to YAs, OAs showed a lower d-prime after shallow encoding across all cognitive effort levels, and after deep encoding with low cognitive effort. Deep encoding with higher levels of cognitive effort completely eliminated these age differences. Our findings support an environmental-compensatory account of cognitive ageing and can have important therapeutic implications.

Decision Making and Ratio Processing in Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment.

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Pertl, Marie-Theres; Benke, Thomas; Zamarian, Laura; Delazer, Margarete

2015-01-01

Making advantageous decisions is important in everyday life. This study aimed at assessing how patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) make decisions under risk. Additionally, it investigated the relationship between decision making, ratio processing, basic numerical abilities, and executive functions. Patients with MCI (n = 22) were compared with healthy controls (n = 29) on a complex task of decision making under risk (Game of Dice Task-Double, GDT-D), on two tasks evaluating basic decision making under risk, on a task of ratio processing, and on several neuropsychological background tests. Patients performed significantly lower than controls on the GDT-D and on ratio processing, whereas groups performed comparably on basic decision tasks. Specifically, in the GDT-D, patients obtained lower net scores and lower mean expected values, which indicate a less advantageous performance relative to that of controls. Performance on the GDT-D correlated significantly with performance in basic decision tasks, ratio processing, and executive-function measures when the analysis was performed on the whole sample. Patients with MCI make sub-optimal decisions in complex risk situations, whereas they perform at the same level as healthy adults in simple decision situations. Ratio processing and executive functions have an impact on the decision-making performance of both patients and healthy older adults. In order to facilitate advantageous decisions in complex everyday situations, information should be presented in an easily comprehensible form and cognitive training programs for patients with MCI should focus--among other abilities--on executive functions and ratio processing.

Video-based training to improve perceptual-cognitive decision-making performance of Australian football umpires.

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Larkin, Paul; Mesagno, Christopher; Berry, Jason; Spittle, Michael; Harvey, Jack

2018-02-01

Decision-making is a central component of the in-game performance of Australian football umpires; however, current umpire training focuses largely on physiological development with decision-making skills development conducted via explicit lecture-style meetings with limited practice devoted to making actual decisions. Therefore, this study investigated the efficacy of a video-based training programme, aimed to provide a greater amount of contextualised visual experiences without explicit instruction, to improve decision-making skills of umpires. Australian football umpires (n = 52) were recruited from metropolitan and regional Division 1 competitions. Participants were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group and classified according to previous umpire game experience (i.e., experienced; less experienced). The intervention group completed a 12-week video-based decision-making training programme, with decision-making performance assessed at pre-training, and 1-week retention and 3-week retention periods. The control group did not complete any video-based training. Results indicated a significant Group (intervention; Control) × Test interaction (F(1, 100) = 3.98; P = 0.02, partial ῆ 2  = 0.074), with follow-up pairwise comparisons indicating significant within-group differences over time for the intervention group. In addition, decision-making performance of the less experienced umpires in the intervention group significantly improved (F(2, 40) = 5.03, P = 0.01, partial ῆ 2  = 0.201). Thus, video-based training programmes may be a viable adjunct to current training programmes to hasten decision-making development, especially for less experienced umpires.

Is Hand Selection Modulated by Cognitive-perceptual Load?

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Liang, Jiali; Wilkinson, Krista; Sainburg, Robert L

2018-01-15

Previous studies proposed that selecting which hand to use for a reaching task appears to be modulated by a factor described as "task difficulty". However, what features of a task might contribute to greater or lesser "difficulty" in the context of hand selection decisions has yet to be determined. There has been evidence that biomechanical and kinematic factors such as movement smoothness and work can predict patterns of selection across the workspace, suggesting a role of predictive cost analysis in hand-selection. We hypothesize that this type of prediction for hand-selection should recruit substantial cognitive resources and thus should be influenced by cognitive-perceptual loading. We test this hypothesis by assessing the role of cognitive-perceptual loading on hand selection decisions, using a visual search task that presents different levels of difficulty (cognitive-perceptual load), as established in previous studies on overall response time and efficiency of visual search. Although the data are necessarily preliminary due to small sample size, our data suggested an influence of cognitive-perceptual load on hand selection, such that the dominant hand was selected more frequently as cognitive load increased. Interestingly, cognitive-perceptual loading also increased cross-midline reaches with both hands. Because crossing midline is more costly in terms of kinematic and kinetic factors, our findings suggest that cognitive processes are normally engaged to avoid costly actions, and that the choice not-to-cross midline requires cognitive resources. Copyright © 2017 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The influence of a working memory task on affective perception of facial expressions.

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Seung-Lark Lim

Full Text Available In a dual-task paradigm, participants performed a spatial location working memory task and a forced two-choice perceptual decision task (neutral vs. fearful with gradually morphed emotional faces (neutral ∼ fearful. Task-irrelevant word distractors (negative, neutral, and control were experimentally manipulated during spatial working memory encoding. We hypothesized that, if affective perception is influenced by concurrent cognitive load using a working memory task, task-irrelevant emotional distractors would bias subsequent perceptual decision-making on ambiguous facial expression. We found that when either neutral or negative emotional words were presented as task-irrelevant working-memory distractors, participants more frequently reported fearful face perception - but only at the higher emotional intensity levels of morphed faces. Also, the affective perception bias due to negative emotional distractors correlated with a decrease in working memory performance. Taken together, our findings suggest that concurrent working memory load by task-irrelevant distractors has an impact on affective perception of facial expressions.

Differential performance on tasks of affective processing and decision-making in patients with Panic Disorder and Panic Disorder with comorbid Major Depressive Disorder.

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Kaplan, Johanna S; Erickson, Kristine; Luckenbaugh, David A; Weiland-Fiedler, Petra; Geraci, Marilla; Sahakian, Barbara J; Charney, Dennis; Drevets, Wayne C; Neumeister, Alexander

2006-10-01

Neuropsychological studies have provided evidence for deficits in psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and mood disorders. However, neuropsychological function in Panic Disorder (PD) or PD with a comorbid diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) has not been comprehensively studied. The present study investigated neuropsychological functioning in patients with PD and PD + MDD by focusing on tasks that assess attention, psychomotor speed, executive function, decision-making, and affective processing. Twenty-two unmedicated patients with PD, eleven of whom had a secondary diagnosis of MDD, were compared to twenty-two healthy controls, matched for gender, age, and intelligence on tasks of attention, memory, psychomotor speed, executive function, decision-making, and affective processing from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB), Cambridge Gamble Task, and Affective Go/No-go Task. Relative to matched healthy controls, patients with PD + MDD displayed an attentional bias toward negatively-valenced verbal stimuli (Affective Go/No-go Task) and longer decision-making latencies (Cambridge Gamble Task). Furthermore, the PD + MDD group committed more errors on a task of memory and visual discrimination compared to their controls. In contrast, no group differences were found for PD patients relative to matched control subjects. The sample size was limited, however, all patients were drug-free at the time of testing. The PD + MDD patients demonstrated deficits on a task involving visual discrimination and working memory, and an attentional bias towards negatively-valenced stimuli. In addition, patients with comorbid depression provided qualitatively different responses in the areas of affective and decision-making processes.

Effects of acute administration of nicotinic and muscarinic cholinergic agonists and antagonists on performance in different cost-benefit decision making tasks in rats.

Science.gov (United States)

Mendez, Ian A; Gilbert, Ryan J; Bizon, Jennifer L; Setlow, Barry

2012-12-01

Alterations in cost-benefit decision making accompany numerous neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and addiction. Central cholinergic systems have been linked to the etiology and/or treatment of many of these conditions, but little is known about the role of cholinergic signaling in cost-benefit decision making. The goal of these experiments was to determine how cholinergic signaling is involved in cost-benefit decision making, using a behavioral pharmacological approach. Male Long-Evans rats were trained in either "probability discounting" or "delay discounting" tasks, in which rats made discrete-trial choices between a small food reward and a large food reward associated with either varying probabilities of omission or varying delays to delivery, respectively. The effects of acute administration of different doses of nicotinic and muscarinic acetylcholine receptor agonists and antagonists were assessed in each task. In the probability discounting task, acute nicotine administration (1.0 mg/kg) significantly increased choice of the large risky reward, and control experiments suggested that this was due to robust nicotine-induced impairments in behavioral flexibility. In the delay discounting task, the muscarinic antagonists scopolamine (0.03, 0.1, and 0.3 mg/kg) and atropine (0.3 mg/kg) both significantly increased choice of the small immediate reward. Neither mecamylamine nor oxotremorine produced reliable effects on either of the decision making tasks. These data suggest that cholinergic receptors play multiple roles in decision making contexts which include consideration of reward delay or probability. These roles should be considered when targeting these receptors for therapeutic purposes.

Perceptual Computing Aiding People in Making Subjective Judgments

CERN Document Server

Mendel, Jerry

2010-01-01

Explains for the first time how "computing with words" can aid in making subjective judgments. Lotfi Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic, coined the phrase "computing with words" (CWW) to describe a methodology in which the objects of computation are words and propositions drawn from a natural language. Perceptual Computing explains how to implement CWW to aid in the important area of making subjective judgments, using a methodology that leads to an interactive device—a "Perceptual Computer"—that propagates random and linguistic uncertainties into the subjective judg

The Multifold Relationship Between Memory and Decision Making: An Individual-differences Study

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Del Missier, Fabio; Mäntylä, Timo; Hansson, Patrik; Bruine de Bruin, Wändi; Parker, Andrew M.; Nilsson, Lars-Göran

2014-01-01

Several judgment and decision-making tasks are assumed to involve memory functions, but significant knowledge gaps on the memory processes underlying these tasks remain. In a study on 568 adults between 25 to 80 years, hypotheses were tested on the specific relationships between individual differences in working memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory, respectively, and six main components of decision-making competence. In line with the hypotheses, working memory was positively related with the more cognitively-demanding tasks (Resistance to Framing, Applying Decision Rules, and Under/Overconfidence), whereas episodic memory was positively associated with a more experience-based judgment task (Recognizing Social Norms). Furthermore, semantic memory was positively related with two more knowledge-based decision-making tasks (Consistency in Risk Perception and Resistance to Sunk Costs). Finally, the age-related decline observed in some of the decision-making tasks was (partially or totally) mediated by the age-related decline in working memory or episodic memory. These findings are discussed in relation to the functional roles fulfilled by different memory processes in judgment and decision-making tasks. PMID:23565790

Framing matters: Effects of framing on older adults’ exploratory decision-making

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Cooper, Jessica A.; Blanco, Nathaniel; Maddox, W. Todd

2016-01-01

We examined framing effects on exploratory decision-making. In Experiment 1 we tested older and younger adults in two decision-making tasks separated by one week, finding that older adults’ decision-making performance was preserved when maximizing gains, but declined when minimizing losses. Computational modeling indicates that younger adults in both conditions, and older adults in gains-maximization, utilized a decreasing threshold strategy (which is optimal), but older adults in losses were better fit by a fixed-probability model of exploration. In Experiment 2 we examined within-subjects behavior in older and younger adults in the same exploratory decision-making task, but without a time separation between tasks. We replicated the older adult disadvantage in loss-minimization from Experiment 1, and found that the older adult deficit was significantly reduced when the loss-minimization task immediately followed the gains-maximization task. We conclude that older adults’ performance in exploratory decision-making is hindered when framed as loss-minimization, but that this deficit is attenuated when older adults can first develop a strategy in a gains-framed task. PMID:27977218

Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis for Health Care Decision Making--Emerging Good Practices: Report 2 of the ISPOR MCDA Emerging Good Practices Task Force.

Science.gov (United States)

Marsh, Kevin; IJzerman, Maarten; Thokala, Praveen; Baltussen, Rob; Boysen, Meindert; Kaló, Zoltán; Lönngren, Thomas; Mussen, Filip; Peacock, Stuart; Watkins, John; Devlin, Nancy

2016-01-01

Health care decisions are complex and involve confronting trade-offs between multiple, often conflicting objectives. Using structured, explicit approaches to decisions involving multiple criteria can improve the quality of decision making. A set of techniques, known under the collective heading, multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA), are useful for this purpose. In 2014, ISPOR established an Emerging Good Practices Task Force. The task force's first report defined MCDA, provided examples of its use in health care, described the key steps, and provided an overview of the principal methods of MCDA. This second task force report provides emerging good-practice guidance on the implementation of MCDA to support health care decisions. The report includes: a checklist to support the design, implementation and review of an MCDA; guidance to support the implementation of the checklist; the order in which the steps should be implemented; illustrates how to incorporate budget constraints into an MCDA; provides an overview of the skills and resources, including available software, required to implement MCDA; and future research directions. Copyright © 2016 International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Accumulation of evidence during sequential decision making: the importance of top-down factors.

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de Lange, Floris P; Jensen, Ole; Dehaene, Stanislas

2010-01-13

In the last decade, great progress has been made in characterizing the accumulation of neural information during simple unitary perceptual decisions. However, much less is known about how sequentially presented evidence is integrated over time for successful decision making. The aim of this study was to study the mechanisms of sequential decision making in humans. In a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we presented healthy volunteers with sequences of centrally presented arrows. Sequence length varied between one and five arrows, and the accumulated directions of the arrows informed the subject about which hand to use for a button press at the end of the sequence (e.g., LRLRR should result in a right-hand press). Mathematical modeling suggested that nonlinear accumulation was the rational strategy for performing this task in the presence of no or little noise, whereas quasilinear accumulation was optimal in the presence of substantial noise. MEG recordings showed a correlate of evidence integration over parietal and central cortex that was inversely related to the amount of accumulated evidence (i.e., when more evidence was accumulated, neural activity for new stimuli was attenuated). This modulation of activity likely reflects a top-down influence on sensory processing, effectively constraining the influence of sensory information on the decision variable over time. The results indicate that, when making decisions on the basis of sequential information, the human nervous system integrates evidence in a nonlinear manner, using the amount of previously accumulated information to constrain the accumulation of additional evidence.

Cognitive characteristics affecting rational decision making style

OpenAIRE

Rosenberg, Charlotte

2011-01-01

Abstract Decision making is one of the most important and frequent tasks among managers and employees in an organization. Knowledge about more stable cognitive characteristics underlying decision making styles has been requested. This study aimed to examine the relationship between rational decision making style, cognitive style, self efficacy and locus of control. Possible interaction effects in relation to gender were also analyzed. 186 employees at the Ministry of Defence were surveyed...

Theory of mind and decision-making processes are impaired in Parkinson's disease.

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Xi, Chunhua; Zhu, Youling; Mu, Yanfang; Chen, Bing; Dong, Bin; Cheng, Huaidong; Hu, Panpan; Zhu, Chunyan; Wang, Kai

2015-02-15

Prefrontal cortex plays a vital role in the theory of mind (ToM) and decision making, as shown in functional brain imaging and lesion studies. Considering the primary neuropathology of Parkinson's disease (PD) involving the frontal lobe system, patients with PD are expected to exhibit deficits in ToM and social decision making. The aim of this study was to investigate affective ToM and decision making in patients with PD and healthy controls (HC) in a task assessing affective ToM (Reading the Mind in the Eyes, RME) and two decision-making tasks (Iowa Gambling Task, IGT; Game of Dice Task, GDT). Consistent with previous findings, patients with PD were impaired in the affective ToM task, and when making decisions under ambiguity and in risk situations. The score of emotion recognition in the RME task was negatively correlated with the severity of the disease and positively correlated with the total number of advantageous cards chosen in the IGT. However, the final capital in the GDT was correlated with memory impairment. The present study implies that affective ToM and decision making under ambiguity may share similar neural mechanisms, while decision making under ambiguity and decision making under risk may involve processing within different neural networks. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Individual differences in decision making competence revealed by multivariate fMRI.

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Talukdar, Tanveer; Román, Francisco J; Operskalski, Joachim T; Zwilling, Christopher E; Barbey, Aron K

2018-06-01

While an extensive literature in decision neuroscience has elucidated the neurobiological foundations of decision making, prior research has focused primarily on group-level effects in a sample population. Due to the presence of inherent differences between individuals' cognitive abilities, it is also important to examine the neural correlates of decision making that explain interindividual variability in cognitive performance. This study therefore investigated how individual differences in decision making competence, as measured by the Adult Decision Making Competence (A-DMC) battery, are related to functional brain connectivity patterns derived from resting-state fMRI data in a sample of 304 healthy participants. We examined connectome-wide associations, identifying regions within frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital cortex that demonstrated significant associations with decision making competence. We then assessed whether the functional interactions between brain regions sensitive to decision making competence and seven intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) were predictive of specific facets of decision making assessed by subtests of the A-DMC battery. Our findings suggest that individual differences in specific facets of decision making competence are mediated by ICNs that support executive, social, and perceptual processes, and motivate an integrative framework for understanding the neural basis of individual differences in decision making competence. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Effects of acute administration of nicotinic and muscarinic cholinergic agonists and antagonists on performance in different cost–benefit decision making tasks in rats

Science.gov (United States)

Mendez, Ian A.; Gilbert, Ryan J.; Bizon, Jennifer L.

2012-01-01

Rationale Alterations in cost–benefit decision making accompany numerous neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and addiction. Central cholinergic systems have been linked to the etiology and/or treatment of many of these conditions, but little is known about the role of cholinergic signaling in cost–benefit decision making. Objectives The goal of these experiments was to determine how cholinergic signaling is involved in cost–benefit decision making, using a behavioral pharmacological approach. Methods Male Long-Evans rats were trained in either “probability discounting” or “delay discounting” tasks, in which rats made discrete-trial choices between a small food reward and a large food reward associated with either varying probabilities of omission or varying delays to delivery, respectively. The effects of acute administration of different doses of nicotinic and muscarinic acetylcholine receptor agonists and antagonists were assessed in each task. Results In the probability discounting task, acute nicotine administration (1.0 mg/kg) significantly increased choice of the large risky reward, and control experiments suggested that this was due to robust nicotine-induced impairments in behavioral flexibility. In the delay discounting task, the muscarinic antagonists scopolamine (0.03, 0.1, and 0.3 mg/kg) and atropine (0.3 mg/kg) both significantly increased choice of the small immediate reward. Neither mecamylamine nor oxotremorine produced reliable effects on either of the decision making tasks. Conclusions These data suggest that cholinergic receptors play multiple roles in decision making contexts which include consideration of reward delay or probability. These roles should be considered when targeting these receptors for therapeutic purposes. PMID:22760484

Effort-Based Decision-Making Paradigms for Clinical Trials in Schizophrenia: Part 2—External Validity and Correlates.

Science.gov (United States)

Horan, William P; Reddy, L Felice; Barch, Deanna M; Buchanan, Robert W; Dunayevich, Eduardo; Gold, James M; Marder, Steven R; Wynn, Jonathan K; Young, Jared W; Green, Michael F

2015-09-01

Effort-based decision making has strong conceptual links to the motivational disturbances that define a key subdomain of negative symptoms. However, the extent to which effort-based decision-making performance relates to negative symptoms, and other clinical and functionally important variables has yet to be systematically investigated. In 94 clinically stable outpatients with schizophrenia, we examined the external validity of 5 effort-based paradigms, including the Effort Expenditure for Rewards, Balloon Effort, Grip Strength Effort, Deck Choice Effort, and Perceptual Effort tasks. These tasks covered 3 types of effort: physical, cognitive, and perceptual. Correlations between effort related performance and 6 classes of variables were examined, including: (1) negative symptoms, (2) clinically rated motivation and community role functioning, (3) self-reported motivational traits, (4) neurocognition, (5) other psychiatric symptoms and clinical/demographic characteristics, and (6) subjective valuation of monetary rewards. Effort paradigms showed small to medium relationships to clinical ratings of negative symptoms, motivation, and functioning, with the pattern more consistent for some measures than others. They also showed small to medium relations with neurocognitive functioning, but were generally unrelated to other psychiatric symptoms, self-reported traits, antipsychotic medications, side effects, and subjective valuation of money. There were relatively strong interrelationships among the effort measures. In conjunction with findings from a companion psychometric article, all the paradigms warrant further consideration and development, and 2 show the strongest potential for clinical trial use at this juncture. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Decision Making in the Reward and Punishment Variants of the Iowa Gambling Task: Evidence of “Foresight” or “Framing”?

OpenAIRE

Singh, Varsha; Khan, Azizuddin

2012-01-01

Surface-level differences in the reward and punishment variants, specifically greater long-term decision making in the punishment variant of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) observed in previous studies led to the present comparison of long-term decision making in the two IGT variants (n = 320, male = 160). It was contended that risk aversion triggered by a positive frame of the reward variant and risk seeking triggered by a negative frame of the punishment variant appears as long-term decision m...

The cerebellum and decision making under uncertainty.

Science.gov (United States)

Blackwood, Nigel; Ffytche, Dominic; Simmons, Andrew; Bentall, Richard; Murray, Robin; Howard, Robert

2004-06-01

This study aimed to identify the neural basis of probabilistic reasoning, a type of inductive inference that aids decision making under conditions of uncertainty. Eight normal subjects performed two separate two-alternative-choice tasks (the balls in a bottle and personality survey tasks) while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The experimental conditions within each task were chosen so that they differed only in their requirement to make a decision under conditions of uncertainty (probabilistic reasoning and frequency determination required) or under conditions of certainty (frequency determination required). The same visual stimuli and motor responses were used in the experimental conditions. We provide evidence that the neo-cerebellum, in conjunction with the premotor cortex, inferior parietal lobule and medial occipital cortex, mediates the probabilistic inferences that guide decision making under uncertainty. We hypothesise that the neo-cerebellum constructs internal working models of uncertain events in the external world, and that such probabilistic models subserve the predictive capacity central to induction. Copyright 2004 Elsevier B.V.

The Decision-Making Process of a Small Task Group.

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Roderick, Joan C.

1985-01-01

This article focuses on the following areas of group process: the nature of the task group, the steps taken to reach a decision, and the ways in which a leader can effectively manage the inevitable conflict that emerges within groups as the problem-solving process progresses. (CT)

3D technology of Sony Bloggie has no advantage in decision-making of tennis serve direction: A randomized placebo-controlled study.

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Liu, Sicong; Ritchie, Jason; Sáenz-Moncaleano, Camilo; Ward, Savanna K; Paulsen, Cody; Klein, Tyler; Gutierrez, Oscar; Tenenbaum, Gershon

2017-06-01

This study aimed at exploring whether 3D technology enhances tennis decision-making under the conceptual framework of human performance model. A 3 (skill-level: varsity, club, recreational) × 3 (experimental condition: placebo, weak 3D [W3D], strong 3D [S3D]) between-participant design was used. Allocated to experimental conditions by a skill-level stratified randomization, 105 tennis players judged tennis serve direction from video scenarios and rated their perceptions of enjoyment, flow, and presence during task performance. Results showed that varsity players made more accurate decisions than less skilled ones. Additionally, applying 3D technology to typical video displays reduced tennis players' decision-making accuracy, although wearing the 3D glasses led to a placebo effect that shortened the decision-making reaction time. The unexpected negative effect of 3D technology on decision-making was possibly due to participants being more familiar to W3D than to S3D, and relatedly, a suboptimal task-technology match. Future directions for advancing this area of research are offered. Highlights 3D technology augments binocular depth cues to tradition video displays, and thus results in the attainment of more authentic visual representation. This process enhances task fidelity in researching perceptual-cognitive skills in sports. The paper clarified both conceptual and methodological difficulties in testing 3D technology in sports settings. Namely, the nomenclature of video footage (with/without 3D technology) and the possible placebo effect (arising from wearing glasses of 3D technology) merit researchers' attention. Participants varying in level of domain-specific expertise were randomized into viewing conditions using a placebo-controlled design. Measurement consisted of both participants' subjective experience (i.e., presence, flow, and enjoyment) and objective performance (i.e., accuracy and reaction time) in a decision-making task. Findings revealed that

Illusory conjunctions and perceptual grouping in a visual search task in schizophrenia.

Science.gov (United States)

Carr, V J; Dewis, S A; Lewin, T J

1998-07-27

This report describes part of a series of experiments, conducted within the framework of feature integration theory, to determine whether patients with schizophrenia show deficits in preattentive processing. Thirty subjects with a DSM-III-R diagnosis of schizophrenia and 30 age-, gender-, and education-matched normal control subjects completed two computerized experimental tasks, a visual search task assessing the frequency of illusory conjunctions (i.e. false perceptions) under conditions of divided attention (Experiment 3) and a task which examined the effects of perceptual grouping on illusory conjunctions (Experiment 4). We also assessed current symptomatology and its relationship to task performance. Contrary to our hypotheses, schizophrenia subjects did not show higher rates of illusory conjunctions, and the influence of perceptual grouping on the frequency of illusory conjunctions was similar for schizophrenia and control subjects. Nonetheless, specific predictions from feature integration theory about the impact of different target types (Experiment 3) and perceptual groups (Experiment 4) on the likelihood of forming an illusory conjunction were strongly supported, thereby confirming the integrity of the experimental procedures. Overall, these studies revealed no firm evidence that schizophrenia is associated with a preattentive abnormality in visual search using stimuli that differ on the basis of physical characteristics.

Framing matters: Effects of framing on older adults' exploratory decision-making.

Science.gov (United States)

Cooper, Jessica A; Blanco, Nathaniel J; Maddox, W Todd

2017-02-01

We examined framing effects on exploratory decision-making. In Experiment 1 we tested older and younger adults in two decision-making tasks separated by one week, finding that older adults' decision-making performance was preserved when maximizing gains, but it declined when minimizing losses. Computational modeling indicates that younger adults in both conditions, and older adults in gains maximization, utilized a decreasing threshold strategy (which is optimal), but older adults in losses were better fit by a fixed-probability model of exploration. In Experiment 2 we examined within-subject behavior in older and younger adults in the same exploratory decision-making task, but without a time separation between tasks. We replicated the older adult disadvantage in loss minimization from Experiment 1 and found that the older adult deficit was significantly reduced when the loss-minimization task immediately followed the gains-maximization task. We conclude that older adults' performance in exploratory decision-making is hindered when framed as loss minimization, but that this deficit is attenuated when older adults can first develop a strategy in a gains-framed task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Affective and cognitive mechanisms of risky decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Shimp, Kristy G; Mitchell, Marci R; Beas, B Sofia; Bizon, Jennifer L; Setlow, Barry

2015-01-01

The ability to make advantageous decisions under circumstances in which there is a risk of adverse consequences is an important component of adaptive behavior; however, extremes in risk taking (either high or low) can be maladaptive and are characteristic of a number of neuropsychiatric disorders. To better understand the contributions of various affective and cognitive factors to risky decision making, cohorts of male Long-Evans rats were trained in a "Risky Decision making Task" (RDT), in which they made discrete trial choices between a small, "safe" food reward and a large, "risky" food reward accompanied by varying probabilities of footshock. Experiment 1 evaluated the relative contributions of the affective stimuli (i.e., punishment vs. reward) to RDT performance by parametrically varying the magnitudes of the footshock and large reward. Varying the shock magnitude had a significant impact on choice of the large, "risky" reward, such that greater magnitudes were associated with reduced choice of the large reward. In contrast, varying the large, "risky" reward magnitude had minimal influence on reward choice. Experiment 2 compared individual variability in RDT performance with performance in an attentional set shifting task (assessing cognitive flexibility), a delayed response task (assessing working memory), and a delay discounting task (assessing impulsive choice). Rats characterized as risk averse in the RDT made more perseverative errors on the set shifting task than did their risk taking counterparts, whereas RDT performance was not related to working memory abilities or impulsive choice. In addition, rats that showed greater delay discounting (greater impulsive choice) showed corresponding poorer performance in the working memory task. Together, these results suggest that reward-related decision making under risk of punishment is more strongly influenced by the punishment than by the reward, and that risky and impulsive decision making are associated with

Risky decision making in adults with ADHD.

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Matthies, S; Philipsen, A; Svaldi, J

2012-09-01

Risky decision making and disadvantageous choices constitute core characteristics of patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Consequences include negative psychosocial and health-related outcomes. However, risky decision making and its interrelations with emotional states in ADHD are poorly understood. Therefore, the authors investigated risky decision making without and after boredom induction in adults with and without ADHD. In study 1, ADHD patients (n = 15) and age/education matched controls (CG; n = 16) were compared on the Game of Dice Task (GDT), an established task measuring decision making in unambiguous situations. In study 2, ADHD patients (n = 14) and CG (n = 13) underwent boredom induction prior to the GDT. In study 1, ADHD patients selected the disadvantageous alternatives significantly more often than CG. In study 2, no significant group differences were found due to an increase in risky decision making in CG following the boredom induction. Even if severity of depression did not affect our results, it may be necessary to compare GDT responses in ADHD patients with and without current depression. Risk as a motor of disadvantageous decision making needs to be taken into account in therapeutic contexts as a maintenance factor of dysfunctional behaviour. The findings of study 2 are in line with postulated alterations of emotional state adjustment in ADHD. The link between decisions making and emotional regulation in ADHD needs further attention in research. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Observing the observer (I): meta-bayesian models of learning and decision-making.

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Daunizeau, Jean; den Ouden, Hanneke E M; Pessiglione, Matthias; Kiebel, Stefan J; Stephan, Klaas E; Friston, Karl J

2010-12-14

In this paper, we present a generic approach that can be used to infer how subjects make optimal decisions under uncertainty. This approach induces a distinction between a subject's perceptual model, which underlies the representation of a hidden "state of affairs" and a response model, which predicts the ensuing behavioural (or neurophysiological) responses to those inputs. We start with the premise that subjects continuously update a probabilistic representation of the causes of their sensory inputs to optimise their behaviour. In addition, subjects have preferences or goals that guide decisions about actions given the above uncertain representation of these hidden causes or state of affairs. From a Bayesian decision theoretic perspective, uncertain representations are so-called "posterior" beliefs, which are influenced by subjective "prior" beliefs. Preferences and goals are encoded through a "loss" (or "utility") function, which measures the cost incurred by making any admissible decision for any given (hidden) state of affair. By assuming that subjects make optimal decisions on the basis of updated (posterior) beliefs and utility (loss) functions, one can evaluate the likelihood of observed behaviour. Critically, this enables one to "observe the observer", i.e. identify (context- or subject-dependent) prior beliefs and utility-functions using psychophysical or neurophysiological measures. In this paper, we describe the main theoretical components of this meta-Bayesian approach (i.e. a Bayesian treatment of Bayesian decision theoretic predictions). In a companion paper ('Observing the observer (II): deciding when to decide'), we describe a concrete implementation of it and demonstrate its utility by applying it to simulated and real reaction time data from an associative learning task.

Observing the observer (I: meta-bayesian models of learning and decision-making.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jean Daunizeau

2010-12-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we present a generic approach that can be used to infer how subjects make optimal decisions under uncertainty. This approach induces a distinction between a subject's perceptual model, which underlies the representation of a hidden "state of affairs" and a response model, which predicts the ensuing behavioural (or neurophysiological responses to those inputs. We start with the premise that subjects continuously update a probabilistic representation of the causes of their sensory inputs to optimise their behaviour. In addition, subjects have preferences or goals that guide decisions about actions given the above uncertain representation of these hidden causes or state of affairs. From a Bayesian decision theoretic perspective, uncertain representations are so-called "posterior" beliefs, which are influenced by subjective "prior" beliefs. Preferences and goals are encoded through a "loss" (or "utility" function, which measures the cost incurred by making any admissible decision for any given (hidden state of affair. By assuming that subjects make optimal decisions on the basis of updated (posterior beliefs and utility (loss functions, one can evaluate the likelihood of observed behaviour. Critically, this enables one to "observe the observer", i.e. identify (context- or subject-dependent prior beliefs and utility-functions using psychophysical or neurophysiological measures. In this paper, we describe the main theoretical components of this meta-Bayesian approach (i.e. a Bayesian treatment of Bayesian decision theoretic predictions. In a companion paper ('Observing the observer (II: deciding when to decide', we describe a concrete implementation of it and demonstrate its utility by applying it to simulated and real reaction time data from an associative learning task.

Neural reactivation links unconscious thought to decision-making performance.

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Creswell, John David; Bursley, James K; Satpute, Ajay B

2013-12-01

Brief periods of unconscious thought (UT) have been shown to improve decision making compared with making an immediate decision (ID). We reveal a neural mechanism for UT in decision making using blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants (N = 33) encoded information on a set of consumer products (e.g. 48 attributes describing four different cars), and we manipulated whether participants (i) consciously thought about this information (conscious thought), (ii) completed a difficult 2-back working memory task (UT) or (iii) made an immediate decision about the consumer products (ID) in a within-subjects blocked design. To differentiate UT neural activity from 2-back working memory neural activity, participants completed an independent 2-back task and this neural activity was subtracted from neural activity occurring during the UT 2-back task. Consistent with a neural reactivation account, we found that the same regions activated during the encoding of complex decision information (right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left intermediate visual cortex) continued to be activated during a subsequent 2-min UT period. Moreover, neural reactivation in these regions was predictive of subsequent behavioral decision-making performance after the UT period. These results provide initial evidence for post-encoding unconscious neural reactivation in facilitating decision making.

Decision-making impairment in anorexia nervosa: New insights into the role of age and decision-making style.

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Giannunzio, Valeria; Degortes, Daniela; Tenconi, Elena; Collantoni, Enrico; Solmi, Marco; Santonastaso, Paolo; Favaro, Angela

2018-07-01

Patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) often report difficulties in decision making, which may interfere with treatment. The aim of this study was to investigate decision making in a large sample of adolescent and adult patients with AN, by using the Iowa gambling task. Participants were 611 female individuals (310 patients and 301 controls) who underwent neuropsychological and clinical assessment. Significantly poorer decision-making performance was observed in adult patients, whereas no difference emerged between affected and nonaffected adolescents. Both adolescent and adult patients were characterized by trends for higher levels of attention to losses in comparison with healthy controls. Although healthy adult women exhibited better decision-making performance than healthy adolescents, in AN, there was no improvement of decision making with age. A cluster analysis identified 2 different styles of decision making in both patients and controls: a conservative style and an impulsive style. Our study provides evidence of dysfunctional decision making in adult patients with AN and reveals an association between poor decision making and excessive punishment sensitivity in AN. The clinical and scientific implications of these findings merit further exploration. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.

Conceptualizing Surrogate Decision-Making at End of Life in the Intensive Care Unit using Cognitive Task Analysis

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Dionne-Odom, J. Nicholas; Willis, Danny G.; Bakitas, Marie; Crandall, Beth; Grace, Pamela J.

2014-01-01

Background Surrogate decision-makers (SDMs) face difficult decisions at end of life (EOL) for decisionally incapacitated intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Purpose Identify and describe the underlying psychological processes of surrogate decision-making for adults at EOL in the ICU. Method Qualitative case study design using a cognitive task analysis (CTA) interviewing approach. Participants were recruited from October 2012 to June 2013 from an academic tertiary medical center’s ICU located in the rural Northeastern United States. Nineteen SDMs for patients who had died in the ICU completed in-depth semi-structured CTA interviews. Discussion The conceptual framework formulated from data analysis reveals that three underlying, iterative, psychological dimensions: gist impressions, distressing emotions, and moral intuitions impact a SDM’s judgment about the acceptability of either the patient’s medical treatments or his or her condition. Conclusion The framework offers initial insights about the underlying psychological processes of surrogate decision-making and may facilitate enhanced decision support for SDMs. PMID:25982772

Perceptual load in sport and the heuristic value of the perceptual load paradigm in examining expertise-related perceptual-cognitive adaptations.

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Furley, Philip; Memmert, Daniel; Schmid, Simone

2013-03-01

In two experiments, we transferred perceptual load theory to the dynamic field of team sports and tested the predictions derived from the theory using a novel task and stimuli. We tested a group of college students (N = 33) and a group of expert team sport players (N = 32) on a general perceptual load task and a complex, soccer-specific perceptual load task in order to extend the understanding of the applicability of perceptual load theory and further investigate whether distractor interference may differ between the groups, as the sport-specific processing task may not exhaust the processing capacity of the expert participants. In both, the general and the specific task, the pattern of results supported perceptual load theory and demonstrates that the predictions of the theory also transfer to more complex, unstructured situations. Further, perceptual load was the only determinant of distractor processing, as we neither found expertise effects in the general perceptual load task nor the sport-specific task. We discuss the heuristic utility of using response-competition paradigms for studying both general and domain-specific perceptual-cognitive adaptations.

Making perceptual learning practical to improve visual functions.

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Polat, Uri

2009-10-01

Task-specific improvement in performance after training is well established. The finding that learning is stimulus-specific and does not transfer well between different stimuli, between stimulus locations in the visual field, or between the two eyes has been used to support the notion that neurons or assemblies of neurons are modified at the earliest stage of cortical processing. However, a debate regarding the proposed mechanism underlying perceptual learning is an ongoing issue. Nevertheless, generalization of a trained task to other functions is an important key, for both understanding the neural mechanisms and the practical value of the training. This manuscript describes a structured perceptual learning method that previously used (amblyopia, myopia) and a novel technique and results that were applied for presbyopia. In general, subjects were trained for contrast detection of Gabor targets under lateral masking conditions. Training improved contrast sensitivity and diminished the lateral suppression when it existed (amblyopia). The improvement was transferred to unrelated functions such as visual acuity. The new results of presbyopia show substantial improvement of the spatial and temporal contrast sensitivity, leading to improved processing speed of target detection as well as reaction time. Consequently, the subjects, who were able to eliminate the need for reading glasses, benefited. Thus, here we show that the transfer of functions indicates that the specificity of improvement in the trained task can be generalized by repetitive practice of target detection, covering a sufficient range of spatial frequencies and orientations, leading to an improvement in unrelated visual functions. Thus, perceptual learning can be a practical method to improve visual functions in people with impaired or blurred vision.

Reasoning in explanation-based decision making.

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Pennington, N; Hastie, R

1993-01-01

A general theory of explanation-based decision making is outlined and the multiple roles of inference processes in the theory are indicated. A typology of formal and informal inference forms, originally proposed by Collins (1978a, 1978b), is introduced as an appropriate framework to represent inferences that occur in the overarching explanation-based process. Results from the analysis of verbal reports of decision processes are presented to demonstrate the centrality and systematic character of reasoning in a representative legal decision-making task.

The Neural Circuitry of Expertise: Perceptual Learning and Social Cognition

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Michael eHarre

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Amongst the most significant questions we are confronted with today include the integration of the brain's micro-circuitry, our ability to build the complex social networks that underpin society and how our society impacts on our ecological environment. In trying to unravel these issues one place to begin is at the level of the individual: to consider how we accumulate information about our environment, how this information leads to decisions and how our individual decisions in turn create our social environment. While this is an enormous task, we may already have at hand many of the tools we need. This article is intended to review some of the recent results in neuro-cognitive research and show how they can be extended to two very specific types of expertise: perceptual expertise and social cognition. These two cognitive skills span a vast range of our genetic heritage. Perceptual expertise developed very early in our evolutionary history and is likely a highly developed part of all mammals' cognitive ability. On the other hand social cognition is most highly developed in humans in that we are able to maintain larger and more stable long term social connections with more behaviourally diverse individuals than any other species. To illustrate these ideas I will discuss board games as a toy model of social interactions as they include many of the relevant concepts: perceptual learning, decision-making, long term planning and understanding the mental states of other people. Using techniques that have been developed in mathematical psychology, I show that we can represent some of the key features of expertise using stochastic differential equations. Such models demonstrate how an expert's long exposure to a particular context influences the information they accumulate in order to make a decision.These processes are not confined to board games, we are all experts in our daily lives through long exposure to the many regularities of daily tasks and

Impaired strategic decision making in schizophrenia.

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Kim, Hyojin; Lee, Daeyeol; Shin, Young-Min; Chey, Jeanyung

2007-11-14

Adaptive decision making in dynamic social settings requires frequent re-evaluation of choice outcomes and revision of strategies. This requires an array of multiple cognitive abilities, such as working memory and response inhibition. Thus, the disruption of such abilities in schizophrenia can have significant implications for social dysfunctions in affected patients. In the present study, 20 schizophrenia patients and 20 control subjects completed two computerized binary decision-making tasks. In the first task, the participants played a competitive zero-sum game against a computer in which the predictable choice behavior was penalized and the optimal strategy was to choose the two targets stochastically. In the second task, the expected payoffs of the two targets were fixed and unaffected by the subject's choices, so the optimal strategy was to choose the target with the higher expected payoff exclusively. The schizophrenia patients earned significantly less money during the first task, even though their overall choice probabilities were not significantly different from the control subjects. This was mostly because patients were impaired in integrating the outcomes of their previous choices appropriately in order to maintain the optimal strategy. During the second task, the choices of patients and control subjects displayed more similar patterns. This study elucidated the specific components in strategic decision making that are impaired in schizophrenia. The deficit, which can be characterized as strategic stiffness, may have implications for the poor social adjustment in schizophrenia patients.

Attentional Filter Training but Not Memory Training Improves Decision-Making

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Schmicker, Marlen; M?ller, Patrick; Schwefel, Melanie; M?ller, Notger G.

2017-01-01

Decision-making has a high practical relevance for daily performance. Its relation to other cognitive abilities such as executive control and memory is not fully understood. Here we asked whether training of either attentional filtering or memory storage would influence decision-making as indexed by repetitive assessments of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). The IGT was developed to assess and simulate real-life decision-making (Bechara et al., 2005). In this task, participants gain or lose money...

Decision-Making in the Ventral Premotor Cortex Harbinger of Action

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Pardo-Vazquez, Jose L.; Padron, Isabel; Fernandez-Rey, Jose; Acuña, Carlos

2011-01-01

Although the premotor (PM) cortex was once viewed as the substrate of pure motor functions, soon it was realized that it was involved in higher brain functions. By this it is meant that the PM cortex functions would better be explained as motor set, preparation for limb movement, or sensory guidance of movement rather than solely by a fixed link to motor performance. These findings, together with a better knowledge of the PM cortex histology and hodology in human and non-human primates prompted quantitative studies of this area combining behavioral tasks with electrophysiological recordings. In addition, the exploration of the PM cortex neurons with qualitative methods also suggested its participation in higher functions. Behavioral choices frequently depend on temporal cues, which together with knowledge of previous outcomes and expectancies are combined to decide and choose a behavioral action. In decision-making the knowledge about the consequences of decisions, either correct or incorrect, is fundamental because they can be used to adapt future behavior. The neuronal correlates of a decision process have been described in several cortical areas of primates. Among them, there is evidence that the monkey ventral premotor (PMv) cortex, an anatomical and physiological well-differentiated area of the PM cortex, supports both perceptual decisions and performance monitoring. Here we review the evidence that the steps in a decision-making process are encoded in the firing rate of the PMv neurons. This provides compelling evidence suggesting that the PMv is involved in the use of recent and long-term sensory memory to decide, execute, and evaluate the outcomes of the subjects’ choices. PMID:21991249

Decision-making in the ventral premotor cortex harbinger of action

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José L. ePardo-Vázquez

2011-09-01

Full Text Available Although the premotor cortex (PM was once viewed as the substrate of pure motor functions, soon it was realized that it was involved in higher brain functions. By this it is meant that the PM cortex functions would better be explained as motor set, preparation for limb movement or sensory guidance of movement rather than solely by a fixed link to motor performance. These findings, together with a better knowledge of the PM cortex histology and hodology in human and non-human primates prompted quantitative studies of this area combining behavioral tasks with electrophysiological recordings. In addition, the exploration of the PM cortex neurons with qualitative methods also suggested its participation in higher functions. Behavioral choices frequently depend on temporal cues, which together with knowledge of previous outcomes and expectancies are combined to decide and choose a behavioral action. In decision-making the knowledge about the consequences of decisions, either correct or incorrect, is fundamental because they can be used to adapt future behavior. The neuronal correlates of a decision process have been described in several cortical areas of primates. Among them, there is evidence that the monkey ventral premotor cortex (PMv, an anatomical and physiological well-differentiated area of the PM cortex, supports both perceptual decisions and performance monitoring. Here we review the evidence that the steps in a decision making process are encoded in the firing rate of the PMv neurons. This provides compelling evidence suggesting that the PMv is involved in the use of recent and long-term sensory memory to decide, execute and evaluate the outcomes of the subjects’ choices.

Sharpened cortical tuning and enhanced cortico-cortical communication contribute to the long-term neural mechanisms of visual motion perceptual learning.

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Chen, Nihong; Bi, Taiyong; Zhou, Tiangang; Li, Sheng; Liu, Zili; Fang, Fang

2015-07-15

Much has been debated about whether the neural plasticity mediating perceptual learning takes place at the sensory or decision-making stage in the brain. To investigate this, we trained human subjects in a visual motion direction discrimination task. Behavioral performance and BOLD signals were measured before, immediately after, and two weeks after training. Parallel to subjects' long-lasting behavioral improvement, the neural selectivity in V3A and the effective connectivity from V3A to IPS (intraparietal sulcus, a motion decision-making area) exhibited a persistent increase for the trained direction. Moreover, the improvement was well explained by a linear combination of the selectivity and connectivity increases. These findings suggest that the long-term neural mechanisms of motion perceptual learning are implemented by sharpening cortical tuning to trained stimuli at the sensory processing stage, as well as by optimizing the connections between sensory and decision-making areas in the brain. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Action video games do not improve the speed of information processing in simple perceptual tasks.

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van Ravenzwaaij, Don; Boekel, Wouter; Forstmann, Birte U; Ratcliff, Roger; Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan

2014-10-01

Previous research suggests that playing action video games improves performance on sensory, perceptual, and attentional tasks. For instance, Green, Pouget, and Bavelier (2010) used the diffusion model to decompose data from a motion detection task and estimate the contribution of several underlying psychological processes. Their analysis indicated that playing action video games leads to faster information processing, reduced response caution, and no difference in motor responding. Because perceptual learning is generally thought to be highly context-specific, this transfer from gaming is surprising and warrants corroborative evidence from a large-scale training study. We conducted 2 experiments in which participants practiced either an action video game or a cognitive game in 5 separate, supervised sessions. Prior to each session and following the last session, participants performed a perceptual discrimination task. In the second experiment, we included a third condition in which no video games were played at all. Behavioral data and diffusion model parameters showed similar practice effects for the action gamers, the cognitive gamers, and the nongamers and suggest that, in contrast to earlier reports, playing action video games does not improve the speed of information processing in simple perceptual tasks.

Risk approximation in decision making: approximative numeric abilities predict advantageous decisions under objective risk.

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Mueller, Silke M; Schiebener, Johannes; Delazer, Margarete; Brand, Matthias

2018-01-22

Many decision situations in everyday life involve mathematical considerations. In decisions under objective risk, i.e., when explicit numeric information is available, executive functions and abilities to handle exact numbers and ratios are predictors of objectively advantageous choices. Although still debated, exact numeric abilities, e.g., normative calculation skills, are assumed to be related to approximate number processing skills. The current study investigates the effects of approximative numeric abilities on decision making under objective risk. Participants (N = 153) performed a paradigm measuring number-comparison, quantity-estimation, risk-estimation, and decision-making skills on the basis of rapid dot comparisons. Additionally, a risky decision-making task with exact numeric information was administered, as well as tasks measuring executive functions and exact numeric abilities, e.g., mental calculation and ratio processing skills, were conducted. Approximative numeric abilities significantly predicted advantageous decision making, even beyond the effects of executive functions and exact numeric skills. Especially being able to make accurate risk estimations seemed to contribute to superior choices. We recommend approximation skills and approximate number processing to be subject of future investigations on decision making under risk.

Selective attention increases choice certainty in human decision making.

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Zizlsperger, Leopold; Sauvigny, Thomas; Haarmeier, Thomas

2012-01-01

Choice certainty is a probabilistic estimate of past performance and expected outcome. In perceptual decisions the degree of confidence correlates closely with choice accuracy and reaction times, suggesting an intimate relationship to objective performance. Here we show that spatial and feature-based attention increase human subjects' certainty more than accuracy in visual motion discrimination tasks. Our findings demonstrate for the first time a dissociation of choice accuracy and certainty with a significantly stronger influence of voluntary top-down attention on subjective performance measures than on objective performance. These results reveal a so far unknown mechanism of the selection process implemented by attention and suggest a unique biological valence of choice certainty beyond a faithful reflection of the decision process.

Clinical and genetic correlates of decision making in anorexia nervosa.

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Tenconi, Elena; Degortes, Daniela; Clementi, Maurizio; Collantoni, Enrico; Pinato, Claudia; Forzan, Monica; Cassina, Matteo; Santonastaso, Paolo; Favaro, Angela

2016-01-01

Decision-making (DM) abilities have been found to be impaired in anorexia nervosa (AN), but few data are available about the characteristics and correlates of this cognitive function. The aim of the present study was to provide data on DM functioning in AN using both veridical and adaptive paradigms. While in veridical DM tasks, the individual's ability to predict a true/false response is measured, adaptive DM is the ability to consider both internal and external demands in order to make a good choice, in the absence of a single true "correct" answer. The participants were 189 women, of whom 91 were eating-disordered patients with a lifetime diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, and 98 were healthy women. All the participants underwent clinical, neuropsychological, and genetic assessment. The cognitive evaluation included a set of neuropsychological tasks and two decision-making tests: The Iowa Gambling Task and the Cognitive Bias Task. Anorexia nervosa patients showed significantly poorer performances on both decision-making tasks than healthy women. The Cognitive Bias Task revealed that anorexia nervosa patients employed significantly more context-independent decision-making strategies, which were independent from diagnostic subtype, handedness, education, and psychopathology. In the whole sample (patients and controls), Cognitive Bias Task performance was independently predicted by lifetime anorexia nervosa diagnosis, body mass index at assessment, and 5-HTTLPR genotype. Patients displayed poor decision-making functioning in both veridical and adaptive situations. The difficulties detected in anorexia nervosa individuals may affect not only the ability to consider the future outcomes of their actions (leading to "myopia for the future"), but also the capacity to update and review one's own mindset according to new environmental stimuli.

Agency alters perceptual decisions about action-outcomes.

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Desantis, Andrea; Waszak, Florian; Gorea, Andrei

2016-10-01

Humans experience themselves as agents, capable of controlling their actions and the outcomes they generate (i.e., the sense of agency). Inferences of agency are not infallible. Research shows that we often attribute outcomes to our agency even though they are caused by another agent. Moreover, agents report the sensory events they generate to be less intense compared to the events that are generated externally. These effects have been assessed using highly suprathreshold stimuli and subjective measurements. Consequently, it remains unclear whether experiencing oneself as an agent lead to a decision criterion change and/or a sensitivity change. Here, we investigate this issue. Participants were told that their key presses generated an upward dot motion but that on 30 % of the trials the computer would take over and display a downward motion. The upward/downward dot motion was presented at participant's discrimination threshold. Participants were asked to indicate whether they (upward motion) or the computer (downward motion) generated the motion. This group of participants was compared with a 'no-agency' group who performed the same task except that subjects did not execute any actions to generate the dot motion. We observed that the agency group reported seeing more frequently the motion they expected to generate (i.e., upward motion) than the no-agency group. This suggests that agency distorts our experience of (allegedly) caused events by altering perceptual decision processes, so that, in ambiguous contexts, externally generated events are experienced as the outcomes of one's actions.

How the win-lose balance situation affects subsequent decision-making: functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence from a gambling task.

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Dong, G; Lin, X; Zhou, H; Lu, Q

2014-07-11

Humans have been consistently shown to be bad at making decisions, especially in disadvantageous situations. In this study, we designed a task that simulates real-life non-strategic gambling to examine the effect of win-lose balance situations (WIN, LOSS, TIE) on decision-making. In behavioral performances, participants showed shorter response time (RT) in LOSS than in WIN and TIE conditions. Imaging results revealed that decisions in WIN are associated with increased brain activations in the posterior cingulate cortex; decisions in LOSS are associated with increased brain activations in the insula and decreased activations in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Positive correlation was found between brain activation in IFG and RT in LOSS. Overall, we concluded that, in disadvantageous conditions, participants are frustrated by their negative results and tend to make a random selection without full consideration. In advantageous conditions, participants' motivations to gamble are elicited and they tend to engage in more endeavors in making decisions. Copyright © 2014 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Decision making in the reward and punishment variants of the Iowa gambling task: Evidence of foresight or framing?

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Varsha eSingh

2012-07-01

Full Text Available Surface-level differences in the reward and punishment variants, specifically greater long-term decision making in the punishment variant of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT observed in previous studies led to the present comparison of long-term decision making in the two IGT variants (n = 320, male = 160. It was contended that risk-aversion triggered by a positive frame of the reward variant and risk seeking triggered by a negative frame of the punishment variant appears as long-term decision making in the two IGT variants. Apart from the frame of the variant as a within-subjects factor (variant type: reward and punishment, the order in which the frame was triggered (order type: reward–punishment or punishment–reward, and the four types of instructions that delineated motivation towards reward from that of punishment (reward, punishment, reward and punishment, and no-hint were hypothesized to have an effect on foresighted decision making in the IGT. As expected, long-term decision making differed across the two IGT variants suggesting that the frame of the variant has an effect on long-term decision making in the IGT (p < 0.001. The order in which a variant was presented, and the type of the instructions that were used both had an effect on long-term decision making in the two IGT variants (p < 0.05. A post hoc test suggested that the instructions that differentiated between reward and punishment resulted in greater foresight than the commonly used IGT instructions that fail to distinguish between reward and punishment. As observed in previous studies, there were more number of participants (60% who showed greater foresight in the punishment variant than in the reward variant (p< 0.001. The results suggest that foresight in IGT decision making is sensitive to reward and punishment frame in an asymmetric manner, an observation that is aligned with the behavioral decision-making framework. Benefits of integrating findings from behavioral studies

Perceptual Decision Making Through the Eyes of a Large-scale Neural Model of V1

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Jianing eShi

2013-04-01

Full Text Available Sparse coding has been posited as an efficient information processing strategy employed by sensory systems, particularly visual cortex. Substantial theoretical and experimental work has focused on the issue of sparse encoding, namely how the early visual system maps the scene into a sparse representation. In this paper we investigate the complementary issue of sparse decoding, for example given activity generated by a realistic mapping of the visual scene to neuronal spike trains, how do downstream neurons best utilize this representation to generate a decision. Specifically we consider both sparse (L1 regularized and non-sparse (L2 regularized linear decoding for mapping the neural dynamics of a large-scale spiking neuron model of primary visual cortex (V1 to a two alternative forced choice (2-AFC perceptual decision. We show that while both sparse and non-sparse linear decoding yield discrimination results quantitatively consistent with human psychophysics, sparse linear decoding is more efficient in terms of the number of selected informative dimension.

Aging and the neuroeconomics of decision making: A review.

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Brown, Stephen B R E; Ridderinkhof, K Richard

2009-12-01

Neuroeconomics refers to a combination of paradigms derived from neuroscience, psychology, and economics for the study of decision making and is an area that has received considerable scientific attention in the recent literature. Using realistic laboratory tasks, researchers seek to study the neurocognitive processes underlying economic decision making and outcome-based decision learning, as well as individual differences in these processes and the social and affective factors that modulate them. To this point, one question has remained largely unanswered: What happens to decision-making processes and their neural substrates during aging? After all, aging is associated with neurocognitive change, which may affect outcome-based decision making. In our study, we use the subjective expected utility model-a well-established decision-making model in economics-as a descriptive framework. After a short survey of the brain areas and neurotransmitter systems associated with outcome-based decision making-and of the effects of aging thereon-we review a number of decision-making studies. Their general data pattern indicates that the decision-making process is changed by age: The elderly perform less efficiently than younger participants, as demonstrated, for instance, by the smaller total rewards that the elderly acquire in lab tasks. These findings are accounted for in terms of age-related deficiencies in the probability and value parameters of the subjective expected utility model. Finally, we discuss some implications and suggestions for future research.

Selective impairment of decision making under ambiguity in alexithymia.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Lei; Wang, Xue; Zhu, Yu; Li, Hongchen; Zhu, Chunyan; Yu, Fengqiong; Wang, Kai

2017-11-28

Alexithymia is characterised by difficulties identifying and describing emotions. Few studies have investigated how alexithymia influences decision-making under different conditions (ambiguity and risk). This study aimed to examine whether alexithymia contributes to impairment in decision-making. This study included 42 participants with high scores in the Chinese version of Toronto Alexithymia Scale (alexithymia group), and 44 matched subjects with low scores (control group). Decision-making was measured using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Game of Dice Task (GDT). The main findings of this study revealed selective deficits in IGT performance for the alexithymia group, while GDT performance was unimpaired when compared with the control group. In IGT, total netscores were lower for the alexithymia group compared to the control group, particularly with regard to block 5. Moreover, the alexithymia individuals selected significantly more adverse cards than the controls, indicating significant decision-making impairments. Alexithymia selectively influences decision-making under ambiguity.

The Neuroscience of Social Decision-Making

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Rilling, J.K.; Sanfey, A.G.

2011-01-01

Given that we live in highly complex social environments, many of our most important decisions are made in the context of social interactions. Simple but sophisticated tasks from a branch of experimental economics known as game theory have been used to study social decision-making in the laboratory

Affective decision-making and externalizing behaviors: the role of autonomic activity.

Science.gov (United States)

Bubier, Jennifer L; Drabick, Deborah A G

2008-08-01

We tested a conceptual model involving the inter-relations among affective decision-making (indexed by a gambling task), autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) symptoms in a largely impoverished, inner city sample of first through third grade children (N=63, 54% male). The present study hypothesized that impaired affective decision-making and decreased sympathetic and parasympathetic activation would be associated with higher levels of ADHD and ODD symptoms, and that low sympathetic and parasympathetic activation during an emotion-inducing task would mediate the relation between affective decision-making and child externalizing symptoms. In support of our model, disadvantageous decision-making on a gambling task was associated with ADHD hyperactivity/impulsivity symptoms among boys, and attenuated sympathetic activation during an emotion-inducing task mediated this relation. Support for the model was not found among girls.

Selective attention to task-irrelevant emotional distractors is unaffected by the perceptual load associated with a foreground task.

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Hindi Attar, Catherine; Müller, Matthias M

2012-01-01

A number of studies have shown that emotionally arousing stimuli are preferentially processed in the human brain. Whether or not this preference persists under increased perceptual load associated with a task at hand remains an open question. Here we manipulated two possible determinants of the attentional selection process, perceptual load associated with a foreground task and the emotional valence of concurrently presented task-irrelevant distractors. As a direct measure of sustained attentional resource allocation in early visual cortex we used steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) elicited by distinct flicker frequencies of task and distractor stimuli. Subjects either performed a detection (low load) or discrimination (high load) task at a centrally presented symbol stream that flickered at 8.6 Hz while task-irrelevant neutral or unpleasant pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) flickered at a frequency of 12 Hz in the background of the stream. As reflected in target detection rates and SSVEP amplitudes to both task and distractor stimuli, unpleasant relative to neutral background pictures more strongly withdrew processing resources from the foreground task. Importantly, this finding was unaffected by the factor 'load' which turned out to be a weak modulator of attentional processing in human visual cortex.

Selective attention to task-irrelevant emotional distractors is unaffected by the perceptual load associated with a foreground task.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Catherine Hindi Attar

Full Text Available A number of studies have shown that emotionally arousing stimuli are preferentially processed in the human brain. Whether or not this preference persists under increased perceptual load associated with a task at hand remains an open question. Here we manipulated two possible determinants of the attentional selection process, perceptual load associated with a foreground task and the emotional valence of concurrently presented task-irrelevant distractors. As a direct measure of sustained attentional resource allocation in early visual cortex we used steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs elicited by distinct flicker frequencies of task and distractor stimuli. Subjects either performed a detection (low load or discrimination (high load task at a centrally presented symbol stream that flickered at 8.6 Hz while task-irrelevant neutral or unpleasant pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS flickered at a frequency of 12 Hz in the background of the stream. As reflected in target detection rates and SSVEP amplitudes to both task and distractor stimuli, unpleasant relative to neutral background pictures more strongly withdrew processing resources from the foreground task. Importantly, this finding was unaffected by the factor 'load' which turned out to be a weak modulator of attentional processing in human visual cortex.

Developmental and sex-related differences in preschoolers' affective decision making.

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Heilman, Renata M; Miu, Andrei C; Benga, Oana

2009-01-01

This study investigated developmental and sex-related differences in affective decision making, using a two-deck version of Children's Gambling Task administered to 3- and 4-year-old children. The main findings were that 4-year-old children displayed better decision-making performance than 3-year-olds. This effect was independent of developmental changes in inductive reasoning, language, and working memory. There were also sex differences in decision-making performance, which were apparent only in 3-year-old children and favored girls. Moreover, age predicted awareness of task and the correlation between the latter and decision-making performance was significant, but only in 4-year-old children. This study thus indicates that there is a remarkable developmental leap in affective decision making, whose effects are apparent around the age of 4, which according to our results, also marks the age when the correlation of declarative knowledge and decision-making performance becomes significant.

Decision-making deficits in patients with chronic schizophrenia: Iowa Gambling Task and Prospect Valence Learning model.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Myung-Sun; Kang, Bit-Na; Lim, Jae Young

2016-01-01

Decision-making is the process of forming preferences for possible options, selecting and executing actions, and evaluating the outcome. This study used the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Prospect Valence Learning (PVL) model to investigate deficits in risk-reward related decision-making in patients with chronic schizophrenia, and to identify decision-making processes that contribute to poor IGT performance in these patients. Thirty-nine patients with schizophrenia and 31 healthy controls participated. Decision-making was measured by total net score, block net scores, and the total number of cards selected from each deck of the IGT. PVL parameters were estimated with the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling scheme in OpenBugs and BRugs, its interface to R, and the estimated parameters were analyzed with the Mann-Whitney U-test. The schizophrenia group received significantly lower total net scores compared to the control group. In terms of block net scores, an interaction effect of group × block was observed. The block net scores of the schizophrenia group did not differ across the five blocks, whereas those of the control group increased as the blocks progressed. The schizophrenia group obtained significantly lower block net scores in the fourth and fifth blocks of the IGT and selected cards from deck D (advantageous) less frequently than the control group. Additionally, the schizophrenia group had significantly lower values on the utility-shape, loss-aversion, recency, and consistency parameters of the PVL model. These results indicate that patients with schizophrenia experience deficits in decision-making, possibly due to failure in learning the expected value of each deck, and incorporating outcome experiences of previous trials into expectancies about options in the present trial.

Investigating decision rules with a new experimental design: the EXACT paradigm

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Biscione, Valerio; Harris, Christopher M.

2015-01-01

In the decision-making field, it is important to distinguish between the perceptual process (how information is collected) and the decision rule (the strategy governing decision-making). We propose a new paradigm, called EXogenous ACcumulation Task (EXACT) to disentangle these two components. The paradigm consists of showing a horizontal gauge that represents the probability of receiving a reward at time t and increases with time. The participant is asked to press a button when they want to request a reward. Thus, the perceptual mechanism is hard-coded and does not need to be inferred from the data. Based on this paradigm, we compared four decision rules (Bayes Risk, Reward Rate, Reward/Accuracy, and Modified Reward Rate) and found that participants appeared to behave according to the Modified Reward Rate. We propose a new way of analysing the data by using the accuracy of responses, which can only be inferred in classic RT tasks. Our analysis suggests that several experimental findings such as RT distribution and its relationship with experimental conditions, usually deemed to be the result of a rise-to-threshold process, may be simply explained by the effect of the decision rule employed. PMID:26578916

Real-life decision making in college students. I: Consistency across specific decisions.

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Galotti, Kathleen M; Wiener, Hillary J D; Tandler, Jane M

2014-01-01

First-year undergraduates participated in a short-term longitudinal study of real-life decision making over their first 14 months of college. They were surveyed about 7 different decisions: choosing courses for an upcoming term (3 different terms), choosing an academic major (twice), planning for the upcoming summer, and planning for sophomore-year housing. Participants showed moderate levels of consistency in the options they considered and in the criteria they used to decide between options, with about half of the options or criteria being used at 2 different points on the decision repeatedly studied. Participants varied somewhat in structural consistency, the tendency to consider the same number of options or criteria across decisions. They also varied in the way they integrated information across decision-making tasks. We suggest that people attempt to keep the information demands of the task within workable limits, sometimes sacrificing consistency as a result.

Emotional and Social Factors influence Poker Decision Making Accuracy.

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Laakasuo, Michael; Palomäki, Jussi; Salmela, Mikko

2015-09-01

Poker is a social game, where success depends on both game strategic knowledge and emotion regulation abilities. Thus, poker provides a productive environment for studying the effects of emotional and social factors on micro-economic decision making. Previous research indicates that experiencing negative emotions, such as moral anger, reduces mathematical accuracy in poker decision making. Furthermore, various social aspects of the game—such as losing against "bad players" due to "bad luck"—seem to fuel these emotional states. We designed an Internet-based experiment, where participants' (N = 459) mathematical accuracy in five different poker decision making tasks were assessed. In addition, we manipulated the emotional and social conditions under which the tasks were presented, in a 2 × 2 experimental setup: (1) Anger versus neutral emotional state—participants were primed either with an anger-inducing, or emotionally neutral story, and (2) Social cue versus non-social cue—during the tasks, either an image of a pair of human eyes was "following" the mouse cursor, or an image of a black moving box was presented. The results showed that anger reduced mathematical accuracy of decision making only when participants were "being watched" by a pair of moving eyes. Experienced poker players made mathematically more accurate decisions than inexperienced ones. The results contribute to current understanding on how emotional and social factors influence decision making accuracy in economic games.

Sexual picture processing interferes with decision-making under ambiguity.

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Laier, Christian; Pawlikowski, Mirko; Brand, Matthias

2014-04-01

Many people watch sexually arousing material on the Internet in order to receive sexual arousal and gratification. When browsing for sexual stimuli, individuals have to make several decisions, all possibly leading to positive or negative consequences. Decision-making research has shown that decisions under ambiguity are influenced by consequences received following earlier decisions. Sexual arousal might interfere with the decision-making process and should therefore lead to disadvantageous decision-making in the long run. In the current study, 82 heterosexual, male participants watched sexual pictures, rated them with respect to sexual arousal, and were asked to indicate their current level of sexual arousal before and following the sexual picture presentation. Afterwards, subjects performed one of two modified versions of the Iowa Gambling Task in which sexual pictures were displayed on the advantageous and neutral pictures on the disadvantageous card decks or vice versa (n = 41/n = 41). Results demonstrated an increase of sexual arousal following the sexual picture presentation. Decision-making performance was worse when sexual pictures were associated with disadvantageous card decks compared to performance when the sexual pictures were linked to the advantageous decks. Subjective sexual arousal moderated the relationship between task condition and decision-making performance. This study emphasized that sexual arousal interfered with decision-making, which may explain why some individuals experience negative consequences in the context of cybersex use.

A cognitive prosthesis for complex decision-making.

Science.gov (United States)

Tremblay, Sébastien; Gagnon, Jean-François; Lafond, Daniel; Hodgetts, Helen M; Doiron, Maxime; Jeuniaux, Patrick P J M H

2017-01-01

While simple heuristics can be ecologically rational and effective in naturalistic decision making contexts, complex situations require analytical decision making strategies, hypothesis-testing and learning. Sub-optimal decision strategies - using simplified as opposed to analytic decision rules - have been reported in domains such as healthcare, military operational planning, and government policy making. We investigate the potential of a computational toolkit called "IMAGE" to improve decision-making by developing structural knowledge and increasing understanding of complex situations. IMAGE is tested within the context of a complex military convoy management task through (a) interactive simulations, and (b) visualization and knowledge representation capabilities. We assess the usefulness of two versions of IMAGE (desktop and immersive) compared to a baseline. Results suggest that the prosthesis helped analysts in making better decisions, but failed to increase their structural knowledge about the situation once the cognitive prosthesis is removed. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Decision making uncertainty, imperfection, deliberation and scalability

CERN Document Server

Kárný, Miroslav; Wolpert, David

2015-01-01

This volume focuses on uncovering the fundamental forces underlying dynamic decision making among multiple interacting, imperfect and selfish decision makers. The chapters are written by leading experts from different disciplines, all considering the many sources of imperfection in decision making, and always with an eye to decreasing the myriad discrepancies between theory and real world human decision making. Topics addressed include uncertainty, deliberation cost and the complexity arising from the inherent large computational scale of decision making in these systems. In particular, analyses and experiments are presented which concern: • task allocation to maximize “the wisdom of the crowd”; • design of a society of “edutainment” robots who account for one anothers’ emotional states; • recognizing and counteracting seemingly non-rational human decision making; • coping with extreme scale when learning causality in networks; • efficiently incorporating expert knowledge in personalized...

Guide to Decision-Making Getting it more right than wrong

CERN Document Server

Drummond, Helga

2012-01-01

We make decisions, and these decisions make us and our organisations. And in theory, decision-making should be easy: a problem is identified, the decision-makers generate solutions, and choose the optimal one - and powerful mathematical tools are available to facilitate the task. Yet if it is all so simple why do organisations, both private and public sector, keep making mistakes - the results of which are borne by shareholders, employees, taxpayers and ultimately society at large? This guide to decision making. by leading decision science academic Helga Drummond, aims to improve decision-maki

Observing the observer (I): meta-bayesian models of learning and decision-making.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Daunizeau, J.; Ouden, H.E.M. den; Pessiglione, M.; Kiebel, S.J.; Stephan, K.E.; Friston, K.J.

2010-01-01

In this paper, we present a generic approach that can be used to infer how subjects make optimal decisions under uncertainty. This approach induces a distinction between a subject's perceptual model, which underlies the representation of a hidden "state of affairs" and a response model, which

Frontopolar cortex and decision-making efficiency: comparing brain activity of experts with different professional background during an exploration-exploitation task

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Daniella eLaureiro-Martínez

2014-01-01

Full Text Available An optimal balance between efficient exploitation of available resources and creative exploration of alternatives is critical for adaptation and survival. Previous studies associated these behavioral drives with, respectively, the dopaminergic mesocorticolimbic system and frontopolar-intraparietal networks. We study the activation of these systems in two age and gender-matched groups of experienced decision-makers differing in prior professional background, with the aim to understand the neural bases of individual differences in decision-making efficiency (performance divided by response time. We compare brain activity of entrepreneurs (who currently manage the organization they founded based on their venture idea and managers (who are constantly involved in making strategic decisions but have no venture experience engaged in a gambling-task assessing exploitative vs. explorative decision-making. Compared with managers, entrepreneurs showed higher decision-making efficiency, and a stronger activation in regions of frontopolar cortex previously associated with explorative choice. Moreover, activity across a network of regions previously linked to explore/exploit tradeoffs explained individual differences in choice efficiency. These results suggest new avenues for the study of individual differences in the neural antecedents of efficient decision-making.

Decision-making deficits in patients diagnosed with disordered gambling using the Cambridge Gambling task: the effects of substance use disorder comorbidity.

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Zois, Evangelos; Kortlang, Noreen; Vollstädt-Klein, Sabine; Lemenager, Tagrid; Beutel, Martin; Mann, Karl; Fauth-Bühler, Mira

2014-07-01

Disordered gambling (DG) has often been associated with impaired decision-making abilities, suggesting a dysfunction in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). To our knowledge, no previous study has accurately considered the effect of substance use disorder (SUD) comorbidity (including nicotine dependence) on decision-making impairments in DG. We employed the Cambridge Gambling Task (CGT) to assess a big cohort of patients diagnosed with DG (N = 80) against matched healthy controls (HCs) (N = 108). The cohort included DG patients with nicotine and alcohol dependence, alcohol dependence only and 12 "pure" nonsmokers with only DG diagnosis. Pure nonsmoking, nicotine dependent as well as alcoholic DGs with current nicotine dependence, demonstrated a decision making profile, characterized by poor decision-making abilities and failure to make right choices (rational), closely resembling that of patients with vmPFC damage. This suggests that DGs with and without SUD comorbidity are equally affected in that domain of decision making abilities. Additionally, gambling diagnosis combined with alcohol and nicotine dependence involves a group of gambling patients with a relatively riskier decision making profile, showing that these patients apart from making irrational decisions take also more risks. Our findings highlight the importance of accounting for SUD comorbidities with useful implications for future research and therapy. Limitations of the current investigation are discussed.

Neural correlates of uncertain decision making: ERP evidence from the Iowa Gambling Task

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Ji-fang eCui

2013-11-01

Full Text Available In our daily life, it is very common to make decisions in uncertain situations. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT has been widely used in laboratory studies because of its good simulation of uncertainty in real life activities. The present study aimed to examine the neural correlates of uncertain decision making with the IGT. Twenty-six university students completed this study. An adapted IGT was administered to them, and the EEG data were recorded. The adapted IGT we used allowed us to analyze the choice evaluation, response selection, and feedback evaluation stages of uncertain decision making within the same paradigm. In the choice evaluation stage, the advantageous decks evoked larger P3 amplitude in the left hemisphere, while the disadvantageous decks evoked larger P3 in the right hemisphere. In the response selection stage, the response of pass (the card was not turned over; the participants neither won nor lost money evoked larger negativity preceding the response compared to that of play (the card was turned over; the participant either won or lost money. In the feedback evaluation stage, feedback-related negativity was only sensitive to the valence (win/loss but not the magnitude (large/small of the outcome, and P3 was sensitive to both the valence and the magnitude of the outcome. These results were consistent with the notion that a positive somatic state was represented in the left hemisphere and a negative somatic state was represented in the right hemisphere. There were also anticipatory ERP effects that guided the participants’ responses and provided evidence for the somatic marker hypothesis with more precise timing.

Decision Making in Healthy Participants on the Iowa Gambling Task: New Insights from an Operant Approach

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peter eBull

2015-04-01

Full Text Available The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT has contributed greatly to the study of affective decision making. However, researchers have observed high inter-study and inter-individual variability in IGT performance in healthy participants, and many are classified as impaired using standard criteria. Additionally, while decision-making deficits are often attributed to atypical sensitivity to reward and/or punishment, the IGT lacks an integrated sensitivity measure. Adopting an operant perspective, two experiments were conducted to explore these issues. In Experiment 1, 50 healthy participants completed a 200-trial version of the IGT which otherwise closely emulated Bechara et al.’s (1999 original computer task. Group data for Trials 1-100 closely replicated Bechara et al.’s original findings of high net scores and preferences for advantageous decks, suggesting that implementations that depart significantly from Bechara’s standard IGT contribute to inter-study variability. During Trials 101-200, mean net scores improved significantly and the percentage of participants meeting the impaired criterion was halved. An operant-style stability criterion applied to individual data revealed this was likely related to individual differences in learning rate. Experiment 2 used a novel operant card task—the Auckland Card Test (ACT—to derive quantitative estimates of sensitivity using the generalized matching law. Relative to individuals who mastered the IGT, persistent poor performers on the IGT exhibited significantly lower sensitivity to magnitudes (but not frequencies of rewards and punishers on the ACT. Overall, our findings demonstrate the utility of operant-style analysis of IGT data and the potential of applying operant concurrent-schedule procedures to the study of human decision making.

Decision-making deficits in patients with chronic schizophrenia: Iowa Gambling Task and Prospect Valence Learning model

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Kim MS

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Myung-Sun Kim,1 Bit-Na Kang,1 Jae Young Lim2 1Department of Psychology, Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul, Republic of Korea; 2Department of Psychiatry, Keyo Medical Foundation, Keyo Hospital, Uiwang, Republic of Korea Purpose: Decision-making is the process of forming preferences for possible options, selecting and executing actions, and evaluating the outcome. This study used the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT and the Prospect Valence Learning (PVL model to investigate deficits in risk-reward related decision-making in patients with chronic schizophrenia, and to identify decision-making processes that contribute to poor IGT performance in these patients. Materials and methods: Thirty-nine patients with schizophrenia and 31 healthy controls participated. Decision-making was measured by total net score, block net scores, and the total number of cards selected from each deck of the IGT. PVL parameters were estimated with the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling scheme in OpenBugs and BRugs, its interface to R, and the estimated parameters were analyzed with the Mann–Whitney U-test.Results: The schizophrenia group received significantly lower total net scores compared to the control group. In terms of block net scores, an interaction effect of group × block was observed. The block net scores of the schizophrenia group did not differ across the five blocks, whereas those of the control group increased as the blocks progressed. The schizophrenia group obtained significantly lower block net scores in the fourth and fifth blocks of the IGT and selected cards from deck D (advantageous less frequently than the control group. Additionally, the schizophrenia group had significantly lower values on the utility-shape, loss-aversion, recency, and consistency parameters of the PVL model. Conclusion: These results indicate that patients with schizophrenia experience deficits in decision-making, possibly due to failure in learning the expected value of each deck

Multiobjective decision-making in integrated water management

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wind, H.G.; Pouwels, I.H.M.; Pouwels, I.H.M.; Witter, V.J.

1995-01-01

Traditionally, decision-making by water authorities in the Netherlands is largely based on intuition. Their tasks were, after all, relatively few and straight-forward. The growing number of tasks, together with the new integrated approach on water management issues, however, induces water

Infection of male rats with Toxoplasma gondii induces effort-aversion in a T-maze decision-making task.

Science.gov (United States)

Tan, Donna; Vyas, Ajai

2016-03-01

Rats chronically infected with protozoan Toxoplasma gondii exhibit greater delay aversion in an inter-temporal task. Moreover T. gondii infection also results in dendritic atrophy of basolateral amygdala neurons. Basolateral amygdala is reported to bias decision making towards greater effortful alternatives. In this context, we report that T. gondii increases effort aversion in infected male rats. This host-parasite association has been widely studied in the context of loss of innate fear in the infected males. It is suggested that reduced fear towards predators reflects a parasitic behavioral manipulation to enhance trophic transmission of T. gondii. Observations reported here extend this paradigm away from a monolithic change in fear and towards a multi-dimensional change in decision making. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Dissociable contributions of anterior cingulate cortex and basolateral amygdala on a rodent cost/benefit decision-making task of cognitive effort.

Science.gov (United States)

Hosking, Jay G; Cocker, Paul J; Winstanley, Catharine A

2014-06-01

Personal success often requires the choice to expend greater effort for larger rewards, and deficits in such effortful decision making accompany a number of illnesses including depression, schizophrenia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Animal models have implicated brain regions such as the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in physical effort-based choice, but disentangling the unique contributions of these two regions has proven difficult, and effort demands in industrialized society are predominantly cognitive in nature. Here we utilize the rodent cognitive effort task (rCET), a modification of the five-choice serial reaction-time task, wherein animals can choose to expend greater visuospatial attention to obtain larger sucrose rewards. Temporary inactivation (via baclofen-muscimol) of BLA and ACC showed dissociable effects: BLA inactivation caused hard-working rats to 'slack off' and 'slacker' rats to work harder, whereas ACC inactivation caused all animals to reduce willingness to expend mental effort. Furthermore, BLA inactivation increased the time needed to make choices, whereas ACC inactivation increased motor impulsivity. These data illuminate unique contributions of BLA and ACC to effort-based decision making, and imply overlapping yet distinct circuitry for cognitive vs physical effort. Our understanding of effortful decision making may therefore require expanding our models beyond purely physical costs.

Rational Decision-Making in Inhibitory Control

Science.gov (United States)

Shenoy, Pradeep; Yu, Angela J.

2011-01-01

An important aspect of cognitive flexibility is inhibitory control, the ability to dynamically modify or cancel planned actions in response to changes in the sensory environment or task demands. We formulate a probabilistic, rational decision-making framework for inhibitory control in the stop signal paradigm. Our model posits that subjects maintain a Bayes-optimal, continually updated representation of sensory inputs, and repeatedly assess the relative value of stopping and going on a fine temporal scale, in order to make an optimal decision on when and whether to go on each trial. We further posit that they implement this continual evaluation with respect to a global objective function capturing the various reward and penalties associated with different behavioral outcomes, such as speed and accuracy, or the relative costs of stop errors and go errors. We demonstrate that our rational decision-making model naturally gives rise to basic behavioral characteristics consistently observed for this paradigm, as well as more subtle effects due to contextual factors such as reward contingencies or motivational factors. Furthermore, we show that the classical race model can be seen as a computationally simpler, perhaps neurally plausible, approximation to optimal decision-making. This conceptual link allows us to predict how the parameters of the race model, such as the stopping latency, should change with task parameters and individual experiences/ability. PMID:21647306

Rational decision-making in inhibitory control.

Science.gov (United States)

Shenoy, Pradeep; Yu, Angela J

2011-01-01

An important aspect of cognitive flexibility is inhibitory control, the ability to dynamically modify or cancel planned actions in response to changes in the sensory environment or task demands. We formulate a probabilistic, rational decision-making framework for inhibitory control in the stop signal paradigm. Our model posits that subjects maintain a Bayes-optimal, continually updated representation of sensory inputs, and repeatedly assess the relative value of stopping and going on a fine temporal scale, in order to make an optimal decision on when and whether to go on each trial. We further posit that they implement this continual evaluation with respect to a global objective function capturing the various reward and penalties associated with different behavioral outcomes, such as speed and accuracy, or the relative costs of stop errors and go errors. We demonstrate that our rational decision-making model naturally gives rise to basic behavioral characteristics consistently observed for this paradigm, as well as more subtle effects due to contextual factors such as reward contingencies or motivational factors. Furthermore, we show that the classical race model can be seen as a computationally simpler, perhaps neurally plausible, approximation to optimal decision-making. This conceptual link allows us to predict how the parameters of the race model, such as the stopping latency, should change with task parameters and individual experiences/ability.

Modeling as a Decision-Making Process

Science.gov (United States)

Bleiler-Baxter, Sarah K.; Stephens, D. Christopher; Baxter, Wesley A.; Barlow, Angela T.

2017-01-01

The goal in this article is to support teachers in better understanding what it means to model with mathematics by focusing on three key decision-making processes: Simplification, Relationship Mapping, and Situation Analysis. The authors use the Theme Park task to help teachers develop a vision of how students engage in these three decision-making…

Population-wide distributions of neural activity during perceptual decision-making

Science.gov (United States)

Machens, Christian

2018-01-01

Cortical activity involves large populations of neurons, even when it is limited to functionally coherent areas. Electrophysiological recordings, on the other hand, involve comparatively small neural ensembles, even when modern-day techniques are used. Here we review results which have started to fill the gap between these two scales of inquiry, by shedding light on the statistical distributions of activity in large populations of cells. We put our main focus on data recorded in awake animals that perform simple decision-making tasks and consider statistical distributions of activity throughout cortex, across sensory, associative, and motor areas. We transversally review the complexity of these distributions, from distributions of firing rates and metrics of spike-train structure, through distributions of tuning to stimuli or actions and of choice signals, and finally the dynamical evolution of neural population activity and the distributions of (pairwise) neural interactions. This approach reveals shared patterns of statistical organization across cortex, including: (i) long-tailed distributions of activity, where quasi-silence seems to be the rule for a majority of neurons; that are barely distinguishable between spontaneous and active states; (ii) distributions of tuning parameters for sensory (and motor) variables, which show an extensive extrapolation and fragmentation of their representations in the periphery; and (iii) population-wide dynamics that reveal rotations of internal representations over time, whose traces can be found both in stimulus-driven and internally generated activity. We discuss how these insights are leading us away from the notion of discrete classes of cells, and are acting as powerful constraints on theories and models of cortical organization and population coding. PMID:23123501

Α4β2 and α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor binding predicts choice preference in two cost benefit decision-making tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Mendez, I A; Damborsky, J C; Winzer-Serhan, U H; Bizon, J L; Setlow, B

2013-01-29

Nicotinic receptors have been linked to a wide range of cognitive and behavioral functions, but surprisingly little is known about their involvement in cost benefit decision making. The goal of these experiments was to determine how nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) expression is related to two forms of cost benefit decision making. Male Long Evans rats were tested in probability- and delay-discounting tasks, which required discrete trial choices between a small reward and a large reward associated with varying probabilities of omission and varying delays to reward delivery, respectively. Following testing, radioligand binding to α4β2 and α7 nAChR subtypes in brain regions implicated in cost benefit decision making was examined. Significant linear relationships were observed between choice of the large delayed reward in the delay discounting task and α4β2 receptor binding in both the dorsal and ventral hippocampus. Additionally, trends were found suggesting that choice of the large costly reward in both discounting tasks was inversely related to α4β2 receptor binding in the medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens shell. Similar trends suggested that choice of the large delayed reward in the delay discounting task was inversely related to α4β2 receptor binding in the orbitofrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens core, and basolateral amygdala, as well as to α7 receptor binding in the basolateral amygdala. These data suggest that nAChRs (particularly α4β2) play both unique and common roles in decisions that require consideration of different types of reward costs. Copyright © 2012 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Age Effects and Heuristics in Decision Making.

Science.gov (United States)

Besedeš, Tibor; Deck, Cary; Sarangi, Sudipta; Shor, Mikhael

2012-05-01

Using controlled experiments, we examine how individuals make choices when faced with multiple options. Choice tasks are designed to mimic the selection of health insurance, prescription drug, or retirement savings plans. In our experiment, available options can be objectively ranked allowing us to examine optimal decision making. First, the probability of a person selecting the optimal option declines as the number of options increases, with the decline being more pronounced for older subjects. Second, heuristics differ by age with older subjects relying more on suboptimal decision rules. In a heuristics validation experiment, older subjects make worse decisions than younger subjects.

A novel perceptual discrimination training task: Reducing fear overgeneralization in the context of fear learning.

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Ginat-Frolich, Rivkah; Klein, Zohar; Katz, Omer; Shechner, Tomer

2017-06-01

Generalization is an adaptive learning mechanism, but it can be maladaptive when it occurs in excess. A novel perceptual discrimination training task was therefore designed to moderate fear overgeneralization. We hypothesized that improvement in basic perceptual discrimination would translate into lower fear overgeneralization in affective cues. Seventy adults completed a fear-conditioning task prior to being allocated into training or placebo groups. Predesignated geometric shape pairs were constructed for the training task. A target shape from each pair was presented. Thereafter, participants in the training group were shown both shapes and asked to identify the image that differed from the target. Placebo task participants only indicated the location of each shape on the screen. All participants then viewed new geometric pairs and indicated whether they were identical or different. Finally, participants completed a fear generalization test consisting of perceptual morphs ranging from the CS + to the CS-. Fear-conditioning was observed through physiological and behavioural measures. Furthermore, the training group performed better than the placebo group on the assessment task and exhibited decreased fear generalization in response to threat/safety cues. The findings offer evidence for the effectiveness of the novel discrimination training task, setting the stage for future research with clinical populations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The neuroscience of social decision-making.

Science.gov (United States)

Rilling, James K; Sanfey, Alan G

2011-01-01

Given that we live in highly complex social environments, many of our most important decisions are made in the context of social interactions. Simple but sophisticated tasks from a branch of experimental economics known as game theory have been used to study social decision-making in the laboratory setting, and a variety of neuroscience methods have been used to probe the underlying neural systems. This approach is informing our knowledge of the neural mechanisms that support decisions about trust, reciprocity, altruism, fairness, revenge, social punishment, social norm conformity, social learning, and competition. Neural systems involved in reward and reinforcement, pain and punishment, mentalizing, delaying gratification, and emotion regulation are commonly recruited for social decisions. This review also highlights the role of the prefrontal cortex in prudent social decision-making, at least when social environments are relatively stable. In addition, recent progress has been made in understanding the neural bases of individual variation in social decision-making.

Take the First Heuristic, Self-Efficacy, and Decision-Making in Sport

Science.gov (United States)

Hepler, Teri J.; Feltz, Deborah L.

2012-01-01

Can taking the first (TTF) option in decision-making lead to the best decisions in sports contexts? And, is one's decision-making self-efficacy in that context linked to TTF decisions? The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the TTF heuristic and self-efficacy in decision-making on a simulated sports task. Undergraduate and graduate…

Entrepreneurial decision-making : Individuals, tasks and cognitions

OpenAIRE

Gustafsson, Veronica

2004-01-01

The aim of the present study is to gain a deeper understanding of decision-making of individuals involved in the entrepreneurial process. It is achieved by comparing entrepreneurs with different level of expertise in contexts that are more or less entrepreneurship-inducing. The issues of learning and expertise – investigation of what entrepreneurial knowledge is and how it is applied – are also addressed. This is an attempt of a multidisciplinary study based on entrepreneurship theory and emp...

Decision making measured by the Iowa Gambling Task in alcohol use disorder and gambling disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Kovács, Ildikó; Richman, Mara J; Janka, Zoltán; Maraz, Aniko; Andó, Bálint

2017-12-01

Gambling disorder (GD) and alcohol use disorder (AD) have similar features, such as elevated impulsivity and decision-making deficits, which are directly linked to relapse and poor therapeutic outcomes. Our aim was to assess decision-making characteristics in GD and AD patients compared to healthy controls (HC) based on one of the most frequently used measures of decision-making: the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). In our systematic literature search of three databases, we identified 1198 empirical articles that mentioned decision-making deficits with the use of the IGT in patients diagnosed with either AD or GD. Possible effects were calculated using meta-analysis. In the end, 17 studies (including 1360 participants) were suitable for inclusion in the meta-analysis reporting data for 23 group contrasts. The random effects estimate indicated impaired IGT performance in both AD patients (N=500; d=-0.581, CI:-89.5decision-making deficit associated with addictive disorders, and that the deficit is more expressed in gambling disorder than in alcohol use disorder. Impaired decision-making plays an important part in poor therapeutic outcomes, thus provides a promising opportunity for cognitive intervention. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Familiarity and recollection in heuristic decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Schwikert, Shane R; Curran, Tim

2014-12-01

Heuristics involve the ability to utilize memory to make quick judgments by exploiting fundamental cognitive abilities. In the current study we investigated the memory processes that contribute to the recognition heuristic and the fluency heuristic, which are both presumed to capitalize on the byproducts of memory to make quick decisions. In Experiment 1, we used a city-size comparison task while recording event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the potential contributions of familiarity and recollection to the 2 heuristics. ERPs were markedly different for recognition heuristic-based decisions and fluency heuristic-based decisions, suggesting a role for familiarity in the recognition heuristic and recollection in the fluency heuristic. In Experiment 2, we coupled the same city-size comparison task with measures of subjective preexperimental memory for each stimulus in the task. Although previous literature suggests the fluency heuristic relies on recognition speed alone, our results suggest differential contributions of recognition speed and recollected knowledge to these decisions, whereas the recognition heuristic relies on familiarity. Based on these results, we created a new theoretical framework that explains decisions attributed to both heuristics based on the underlying memory associated with the choice options. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

The time-course of activation in the dorsal and ventral visual streams during landmark cueing and perceptual discrimination tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Lambert, Anthony J; Wootton, Adrienne

2017-08-01

Different patterns of high density EEG activity were elicited by the same peripheral stimuli, in the context of Landmark Cueing and Perceptual Discrimination tasks. The C1 component of the visual event-related potential (ERP) at parietal - occipital electrode sites was larger in the Landmark Cueing task, and source localisation suggested greater activation in the superior parietal lobule (SPL) in this task, compared to the Perceptual Discrimination task, indicating stronger early recruitment of the dorsal visual stream. In the Perceptual Discrimination task, source localisation suggested widespread activation of the inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) and fusiform gyrus (FFG), structures associated with the ventral visual stream, during the early phase of the P1 ERP component. Moreover, during a later epoch (171-270ms after stimulus onset) increased temporal-occipital negativity, and stronger recruitment of ITG and FFG were observed in the Perceptual Discrimination task. These findings illuminate the contrasting functions of the dorsal and ventral visual streams, to support rapid shifts of attention in response to contextual landmarks, and conscious discrimination, respectively. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Learning affects top down and bottom up modulation of eye movements in decision making

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Orquin, Jacob Lund; Bagger, Martin; Mueller Loose, Simone

2013-01-01

Repeated decision making is subject to changes over time such as decreases in decision time and information use and increases in decision accuracy. We show that a traditional strategy selection view of decision making cannot account for these temporal dynamics without relaxing main assumptions...... about what defines a decision strategy. As an alternative view we suggest that temporal dynamics in decision making are driven by attentional and perceptual processes and that this view has been expressed in the information reduction hypothesis. We test the information reduction hypothesis by integrating...... it in a broader framework of top down and bottom up processes and derive the predictions that repeated decisions increase top down control of attention capture which in turn leads to a reduction in bottom up attention capture. To test our hypotheses we conducted a repeated discrete choice experiment with three...

Negative Affect, Decision Making, and Attentional Networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Ortega, Ana Raquel; Ramírez, Encarnación; Colmenero, José María; García-Viedma, Ma Del Rosario

2017-02-01

This study focuses on whether risk avoidance in decision making depends on negative affect or it is specific to anxious individuals. The Balloon Analogue Risk Task was used to obtain an objective measure in a risk situation with anxious, depressive, and control individuals. The role of attentional networks was also studied using the Attentional Network Test-Interaction (ANT-I) task with neutral stimuli. A significant difference was observed between anxious and depressive individuals in assumed risk in decision making. We found no differences between anxious and normal individuals in the alert, orientation, and congruency effects obtained in the ANT-I task. The results showed that there was no significant relationship between the risk avoidance and the indexes of alertness, orienting, and control. Future research shall determine whether emotionally relevant stimulation leads to attentional control deficit or whether differences between anxious and no anxious individuals are due to the type of strategy followed in choice tasks.

Information processing as a paradigm for decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Oppenheimer, Daniel M; Kelso, Evan

2015-01-03

For decades, the dominant paradigm for studying decision making--the expected utility framework--has been burdened by an increasing number of empirical findings that question its validity as a model of human cognition and behavior. However, as Kuhn (1962) argued in his seminal discussion of paradigm shifts, an old paradigm cannot be abandoned until a new paradigm emerges to replace it. In this article, we argue that the recent shift in researcher attention toward basic cognitive processes that give rise to decision phenomena constitutes the beginning of that replacement paradigm. Models grounded in basic perceptual, attentional, memory, and aggregation processes have begun to proliferate. The development of this new approach closely aligns with Kuhn's notion of paradigm shift, suggesting that this is a particularly generative and revolutionary time to be studying decision science.

Emotion regulation and decision making under risk and uncertainty.

Science.gov (United States)

Heilman, Renata M; Crişan, Liviu G; Houser, Daniel; Miclea, Mircea; Miu, Andrei C

2010-04-01

It is well established that emotion plays a key role in human social and economic decision making. The recent literature on emotion regulation (ER), however, highlights that humans typically make efforts to control emotion experiences. This leaves open the possibility that decision effects previously attributed to acute emotion may be a consequence of acute ER strategies such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. In Study 1, we manipulated ER of laboratory-induced fear and disgust, and found that the cognitive reappraisal of these negative emotions promotes risky decisions (reduces risk aversion) in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task and is associated with increased performance in the prehunch/hunch period of the Iowa Gambling Task. In Study 2, we found that naturally occurring negative emotions also increase risk aversion in Balloon Analogue Risk Task, but the incidental use of cognitive reappraisal of emotions impedes this effect. We offer evidence that the increased effectiveness of cognitive reappraisal in reducing the experience of emotions underlies its beneficial effects on decision making. Copyright 2010 APA, all rights reserved.

The role of muscarinic cholinergic signaling in cost-benefit decision making

Science.gov (United States)

Fobbs, Wambura

Animals regularly face decisions that affect both their immediate success and long term survival. Such decisions typically involve some form of cost-benefit analysis and engage a number of high level cognitive processes, including learning, memory and motivational influences. While decision making has been a focus of study for over a century, it's only in the last 20 years that researchers have begun to identify functional neural circuits that subserve different forms of cost-benefit decision making. Even though the cholinergic system is both functionally and anatomically positioned to modulate cost-benefit decision circuits, the contribution of the cholinergic system to decision making has been little studied. In this thesis, I investigated the cognitive and neural contribution of muscarinic cholinergic signaling to cost-benefit decision making. I, first, re-examined the effects of systemic administration of 0.3 mg/kg atropine on delay and probability discounting tasks and found that blockade of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors by atropine induced suboptimal choices (impulsive and risky) in both tasks. Since the effect on delay discounting was restricted to the No Cue version of the delay discounting task, I concluded that muscarinic cholinergic signaling mediates both forms of cost-benefit decision making and is selectively engaged when decisions require valuation of reward options whose costs are not externally signified. Second, I assessed the impact of inactivating the nucleus basalis (NBM) on both forms decision making and the effect of injecting atropine locally into the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), basolateral amygdala (BLA), or nucleus accumbens (NAc) core during the No Cue version of the delay discounting task. I discovered that although NBM inactivation failed to affect delay discounting, it induced risk aversion in the probability discounting task; and blockade of intra- NAc core, but not intra-OFC or intra-BLA, muscarinic cholinergic signaling lead to

Effects of Emotion on Prospection During Decision-Making

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Darrell A. Worthy

2014-06-01

Full Text Available In two experiments we examined the role of emotion, specifically worry, anxiety and mood, on prospection during decision-making. Worry is a particularly relevant emotion to study in the context of prospection because high levels of worry may make individuals more aversive toward the uncertainty associated with the prospect of obtaining future improvements in rewards or states. Thus, high levels of worry might lead to reduced prospection during decision-making and enhance preference for immediate over delayed rewards. In Experiment 1 participants performed a two-choice dynamic decision-making task where they were required to choose between one option (the decreasing option which provided larger immediate rewards but declines in future states, and another option (the increasing option which provided smaller immediate rewards but improvements in future states, making it the optimal choice. High levels of worry were associated with poorer performance in the task. Additionally, fits of a sophisticated reinforcement-learning model that incorporated both reward-based and state-based information suggested that individuals reporting high levels of worry gave greater weight to the immediate rewards they would receive on each trial than to the degree to which each action would lead to improvements in their future state. In Experiment 2 we found that high levels of worry were associated with greater delay discounting using a standard delay discounting task. Combined, the results suggest that high levels of worry are associated with reduced prospection during decision-making. We attribute these results to high worriers’ aversion toward the greater uncertainty associated with attempting to improve future rewards than to maximize immediate reward. These results have implications for researchers interested in the effects of emotion on cognition, and suggest that emotion strongly affects the focus on temporal outcomes during decision-making.

Effects of emotion on prospection during decision-making.

Science.gov (United States)

Worthy, Darrell A; Byrne, Kaileigh A; Fields, Sherecce

2014-01-01

In two experiments we examined the role of emotion, specifically worry, anxiety, and mood, on prospection during decision-making. Worry is a particularly relevant emotion to study in the context of prospection because high levels of worry may make individuals more aversive toward the uncertainty associated with the prospect of obtaining future improvements in rewards or states. Thus, high levels of worry might lead to reduced prospection during decision-making and enhance preference for immediate over delayed rewards. In Experiment 1 participants performed a two-choice dynamic decision-making task where they were required to choose between one option (the decreasing option) which provided larger immediate rewards but declines in future states, and another option (the increasing option) which provided smaller immediate rewards but improvements in future states, making it the optimal choice. High levels of worry were associated with poorer performance in the task. Additionally, fits of a sophisticated reinforcement-learning model that incorporated both reward-based and state-based information suggested that individuals reporting high levels of worry gave greater weight to the immediate rewards they would receive on each trial than to the degree to which each action would lead to improvements in their future state. In Experiment 2 we found that high levels of worry were associated with greater delay discounting using a standard delay discounting task. Combined, the results suggest that high levels of worry are associated with reduced prospection during decision-making. We attribute these results to high worriers' aversion toward the greater uncertainty associated with attempting to improve future rewards than to maximize immediate reward. These results have implications for researchers interested in the effects of emotion on cognition, and suggest that emotion strongly affects the focus on temporal outcomes during decision-making.

Attentional Filter Training but Not Memory Training Improves Decision-Making.

Science.gov (United States)

Schmicker, Marlen; Müller, Patrick; Schwefel, Melanie; Müller, Notger G

2017-01-01

Decision-making has a high practical relevance for daily performance. Its relation to other cognitive abilities such as executive control and memory is not fully understood. Here we asked whether training of either attentional filtering or memory storage would influence decision-making as indexed by repetitive assessments of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). The IGT was developed to assess and simulate real-life decision-making (Bechara et al., 2005). In this task, participants gain or lose money by developing advantageous or disadvantageous decision strategies. On five consecutive days we trained 29 healthy young adults (20-30 years) either in working memory (WM) storage or attentional filtering and measured their IGT scores after each training session. During memory training (MT) subjects performed a computerized delayed match-to-sample task where two displays of bars were presented in succession. During filter training (FT) participants had to indicate whether two simultaneously presented displays of bars matched or not. Whereas in MT the relevant target stimuli stood alone, in FT the targets were embedded within irrelevant distractors (bars in a different color). All subjects within each group improved their performance in the trained cognitive task. For the IGT, we observed an increase over time in the amount of money gained in the FT group only. Decision-making seems to be influenced more by training to filter out irrelevant distractors than by training to store items in WM. Selective attention could be responsible for the previously noted relationship between IGT performance and WM and is therefore more important for enhancing efficiency in decision-making.

Perceptual biases in relation to paranormal and conspiracy beliefs

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Elk, M.

2015-01-01

Previous studies have shown that one’s prior beliefs have a strong effect on perceptual decision-making and attentional processing. The present study extends these findings by investigating how individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are related to perceptual and attentional

A system of system lenses for leadership decision-making.

Science.gov (United States)

Cady, Phil

2016-01-01

The sheer volume and dynamics among system agents in healthcare makes decision-making a daunting task at all levels. Being clear about what leaders mean by "healthcare system" is critical in aligning system strategy and leadership decision-making. This article presents an emerging set of lenses (ideology and beliefs, rational and irrational information processing, interpersonal social dynamics, process and value creation, and context) to help frame leadership decision-making in healthcare systems. © 2015 The Canadian College of Health Leaders.

Episodic memories predict adaptive value-based decision-making

Science.gov (United States)

Murty, Vishnu; FeldmanHall, Oriel; Hunter, Lindsay E.; Phelps, Elizabeth A; Davachi, Lila

2016-01-01

Prior research illustrates that memory can guide value-based decision-making. For example, previous work has implicated both working memory and procedural memory (i.e., reinforcement learning) in guiding choice. However, other types of memories, such as episodic memory, may also influence decision-making. Here we test the role for episodic memory—specifically item versus associative memory—in supporting value-based choice. Participants completed a task where they first learned the value associated with trial unique lotteries. After a short delay, they completed a decision-making task where they could choose to re-engage with previously encountered lotteries, or new never before seen lotteries. Finally, participants completed a surprise memory test for the lotteries and their associated values. Results indicate that participants chose to re-engage more often with lotteries that resulted in high versus low rewards. Critically, participants not only formed detailed, associative memories for the reward values coupled with individual lotteries, but also exhibited adaptive decision-making only when they had intact associative memory. We further found that the relationship between adaptive choice and associative memory generalized to more complex, ecologically valid choice behavior, such as social decision-making. However, individuals more strongly encode experiences of social violations—such as being treated unfairly, suggesting a bias for how individuals form associative memories within social contexts. Together, these findings provide an important integration of episodic memory and decision-making literatures to better understand key mechanisms supporting adaptive behavior. PMID:26999046

Anticipatory stress influences decision making under explicit risk conditions.

Science.gov (United States)

Starcke, Katrin; Wolf, Oliver T; Markowitsch, Hans J; Brand, Matthias

2008-12-01

Recent research has suggested that stress may affect memory, executive functioning, and decision making on the basis of emotional feedback processing. The current study examined whether anticipatory stress affects decision making measured with the Game of Dice Task (GDT), a decision-making task with explicit and stable rules that taps both executive functioning and feedback learning. The authors induced stress in 20 participants by having them anticipate giving a public speech and also examined 20 comparison subjects. The authors assessed the level of stress with questionnaires and endocrine markers (salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase), both revealing that speech anticipation led to increased stress. Results of the GDT showed that participants under stress scored significantly lower than the comparison group and that GDT performance was negatively correlated with the increase of cortisol. Our results indicate that stress can lead to disadvantageous decision making even when explicit and stable information about outcome contingencies is provided.

Comparison of deck- and trial-based approaches to advantageous decision making on the Iowa Gambling Task.

Science.gov (United States)

Visagan, Ravindran; Xiang, Ally; Lamar, Melissa

2012-06-01

We compared the original deck-based model of advantageous decision making assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) with a trial-based approach across behavioral and physiological outcomes in 33 younger adults (15 men, 18 women; 22.2 ± 3.7 years of age). One administration of the IGT with simultaneous measurement of skin conductance responses (SCRs) was performed and the two methods applied: (a) the original approach of subtracting disadvantageous picks of Decks A and B from advantageous picks of Decks C and D and (b) a trial-based approach focused on the financial outcome for each deck leading up to the trial in question. When directly compared, the deck-based approach resulted in a more advantageous behavioral profile than did the trial-based approach. Analysis of SCR data revealed no significant differences between methods for physiological measurements of SCR fluctuations or anticipatory responses to disadvantageous picks. Post hoc investigation of the trial-based method revealed Deck B contributed to both advantageous and disadvantageous decision making for the majority of participants. When divided by blocks of 20, the number of advantageous to disadvantageous choices reversed as the task progressed despite the total number of picks from Deck B remaining high. SCR fluctuations for Deck B, although not significantly different from the other decks, did show a sharp decline after the first block of 20 and remained below levels for Decks C and D toward the end of the task, suggesting that participants may have gained knowledge of the frequency of loss for this deck. (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved

Making training decisions proactively

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hartman, R.F.

1988-01-01

The challenge of making training decisions with a high degree of confidence as to the results of those decisions face every DOD, Federal, State, and City agency. Training has historically been a very labor and paper intensive system with limited automation support. This paper outlines how one DOD component, the Air Force, is approaching that challenge. The Training Decision System (TDS) will provide the Air Force with an automated decision aid to help plan and estimate the consequences of various mixes of resident training, On-The-Job Training (OJT), and field training within a specialty such as security. The system described provides training from enlistment to separation and responds to hundreds of related security task needs. This system identifies what the tasks are, who should provide the training, what training setting should be used, what proficiency should be achieved, and through computer modeling provides an assessment of training effectiveness options and estimate the impact of implementing those options. With current budgetary constraints and with the possibility of further reductions in the future, the most cost effective training mix must be found to sustain required capabilities

Stress-induced cortisol facilitates threat-related decision making among police officers.

Science.gov (United States)

Akinola, Modupe; Mendes, Wendy Berry

2012-02-01

Previous research suggests that cortisol can affect cognitive functions such as memory, decision making, and attentiveness to threat-related cues. Here, we examine whether increases in cortisol, brought on by an acute social stressor, influence threat-related decision making. Eighty-one police officers completed a standardized laboratory stressor and then immediately completed a computer simulated decision-making task designed to examine decisions to accurately shoot or not shoot armed and unarmed Black and White targets. Results indicated that police officers who had larger cortisol increases to the social-stress task subsequently made fewer errors when deciding to shoot armed Black targets relative to armed White targets, suggesting that hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) activation may exacerbate vigilance for threat cues. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of threat-initiated decision making.

Decision-making in adolescent females who deliberately self-harm

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rigler Tristan

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Self-harming behaviour most commonly begins in adolescence and is more frequent among adolescent females. We explored the hypothesis that adolescent females who deliberately selfharm were more likely to perform worse on a decision-making task. Previous research in adolescents who self-harm reported impaired decision-making. However, research put little emphasis on older adolescents and the emotional learning. In our research, we presented the Iowa Gambling Task to 35 adolescent females who self-harmed and were treated at a psychiatric clinic, and to 35 healthy female controls. Our results show that in comparison to the control group the adolescents who self-harm took more risky decisions and were less concerned about the outcome. In addition, the clinical group also focused more on immediate gains and showed a reduced ability to learn from poor decisions in the past. Further research is suggested to explore the potential neurological correlates of decision-making and selfharming behaviour.

Prefrontal spatial working memory network predicts animal's decision making in a free choice saccade task

Science.gov (United States)

Mochizuki, Kei

2015-01-01

While neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) encode spatial information during the performance of working memory tasks, they are also known to participate in subjective behavior such as spatial attention and action selection. In the present study, we analyzed the activity of primate PFC neurons during the performance of a free choice memory-guided saccade task in which the monkeys needed to choose a saccade direction by themselves. In trials when the receptive field location was subsequently chosen by the animal, PFC neurons with spatially selective visual response started to show greater activation before cue onset. This result suggests that the fluctuation of firing before cue presentation prematurely biased the representation of a certain spatial location and eventually encouraged the subsequent choice of that location. In addition, modulation of the activity by the animal's choice was observed only in neurons with high sustainability of activation and was also dependent on the spatial configuration of the visual cues. These findings were consistent with known characteristics of PFC neurons in information maintenance in spatial working memory function. These results suggest that precue fluctuation of spatial representation was shared and enhanced through the working memory network in the PFC and could finally influence the animal's free choice of saccade direction. The present study revealed that the PFC plays an important role in decision making in a free choice condition and that the dynamics of decision making are constrained by the network architecture embedded in this cortical area. PMID:26490287

Interference effects of categorization on decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Zheng; Busemeyer, Jerome R

2016-05-01

Many decision making tasks in life involve a categorization process, but the effects of categorization on subsequent decision making has rarely been studied. This issue was explored in three experiments (N=721), in which participants were shown a face stimulus on each trial and performed variations of categorization-decision tasks. On C-D trials, they categorized the stimulus and then made an action decision; on X-D trials, they were told the category and then made an action decision; on D-alone trials, they only made an action decision. An interference effect emerged in some of the conditions, such that the probability of an action on the D-alone trials (i.e., when there was no explicit categorization before the decision) differed from the total probability of the same action on the C-D or X-D trials (i.e., when there was explicit categorization before the decision). Interference effects are important because they indicate a violation of the classical law of total probability, which is assumed by many cognitive models. Across all three experiments, a complex pattern of interference effects systematically occurred for different types of stimuli and for different types of categorization-decision tasks. These interference effects present a challenge for traditional cognitive models, such as Markov and signal detection models, but a quantum cognition model, called the belief-action entanglement (BAE) model, predicted that these results could occur. The BAE model employs the quantum principles of superposition and entanglement to explain the psychological mechanisms underlying the puzzling interference effects. The model can be applied to many important and practical categorization-decision situations in life. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Reconciliation of Decision-Making Heuristics Based on Decision Trees Topologies and Incomplete Fuzzy Probabilities Sets.

Science.gov (United States)

Doubravsky, Karel; Dohnal, Mirko

2015-01-01

Complex decision making tasks of different natures, e.g. economics, safety engineering, ecology and biology, are based on vague, sparse, partially inconsistent and subjective knowledge. Moreover, decision making economists / engineers are usually not willing to invest too much time into study of complex formal theories. They require such decisions which can be (re)checked by human like common sense reasoning. One important problem related to realistic decision making tasks are incomplete data sets required by the chosen decision making algorithm. This paper presents a relatively simple algorithm how some missing III (input information items) can be generated using mainly decision tree topologies and integrated into incomplete data sets. The algorithm is based on an easy to understand heuristics, e.g. a longer decision tree sub-path is less probable. This heuristic can solve decision problems under total ignorance, i.e. the decision tree topology is the only information available. But in a practice, isolated information items e.g. some vaguely known probabilities (e.g. fuzzy probabilities) are usually available. It means that a realistic problem is analysed under partial ignorance. The proposed algorithm reconciles topology related heuristics and additional fuzzy sets using fuzzy linear programming. The case study, represented by a tree with six lotteries and one fuzzy probability, is presented in details.

Reconciliation of Decision-Making Heuristics Based on Decision Trees Topologies and Incomplete Fuzzy Probabilities Sets.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karel Doubravsky

Full Text Available Complex decision making tasks of different natures, e.g. economics, safety engineering, ecology and biology, are based on vague, sparse, partially inconsistent and subjective knowledge. Moreover, decision making economists / engineers are usually not willing to invest too much time into study of complex formal theories. They require such decisions which can be (rechecked by human like common sense reasoning. One important problem related to realistic decision making tasks are incomplete data sets required by the chosen decision making algorithm. This paper presents a relatively simple algorithm how some missing III (input information items can be generated using mainly decision tree topologies and integrated into incomplete data sets. The algorithm is based on an easy to understand heuristics, e.g. a longer decision tree sub-path is less probable. This heuristic can solve decision problems under total ignorance, i.e. the decision tree topology is the only information available. But in a practice, isolated information items e.g. some vaguely known probabilities (e.g. fuzzy probabilities are usually available. It means that a realistic problem is analysed under partial ignorance. The proposed algorithm reconciles topology related heuristics and additional fuzzy sets using fuzzy linear programming. The case study, represented by a tree with six lotteries and one fuzzy probability, is presented in details.

Neuropsychological correlates of decision making in patients with bulimia nervosa.

Science.gov (United States)

Brand, Matthias; Franke-Sievert, Christiane; Jacoby, Georg E; Markowitsch, Hans J; Tuschen-Caffier, Brunna

2007-11-01

In addition to the core psychopathology of bulimia nervosa (BN), patients with BN often show impulsive behavior that has been related to decision making deficits in other patient groups, such as individuals with anorexia nervosa and pathological gamblers. However, it remains unclear whether BN patients also show difficulties in decision making. In this study, 14 patients with BN and 14 healthy comparison subjects, matched for age, gender, education, body mass index, and intelligence, were examined with the Game of Dice Task (M. Brand, E. Fujiwara, et al., 2005), a gambling task that has fixed winning probabilities and explicit rules for gains and losses, as well as with a neuropsychological test battery and personality questionnaires. On the task, the patients with BN chose the disadvantageous alternatives more frequently than did the comparison subjects. Performance on the Game of Dice Task was related to executive functioning but not to other neuropsychological functions, personality, or disease-specific variables in the BN group. Thus, in patients with BN, decision making abnormalities and executive reductions can be demonstrated and might be neuropsychological correlates of the patients' dysfunctional everyday-life decision making behavior. Neurocognitive functions should be considered in the treatment of BN. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved.