Embodied decision biases: individually stable across different tasks?

Abstract

In everyday life, action and decision-making often run in parallel. Action-based models argue that action and decision-making strongly interact and, more specifically, that action can bias decision-making. This embodied decision bias is thought to originate from changes in motor costs and/or cognitive crosstalk. Recent research confirmed embodied decision biases for different tasks including walking and manual movements. Yet, whether such biases generalize within individuals across different tasks remains to be determined. To test this, we used two different decision-making tasks that have independently been shown to reliably produce embodied decision biases. In a within-participant design, participants performed two tasks in a counterbalanced fashion: (i) a walking paradigm for which it is known that motor costs systematically influence reward decisions, and (ii) a manual movement task in which motor costs and cognitive crosstalk have been shown to impact reward decisions. In both tasks, we successfully replicated the predicted embodied decision biases. However, there was no evidence that the strength of the biases correlated between tasks. Hence, our findings do not confirm that embodied decision biases transfer between tasks. Future research is needed to examine whether this lack of transfer may be due to different causes underlying the impact of motor costs on decisions and the impact of cognitive crosstalk or task-specific differences.

State anticipation and task serialization attenuate embodied decision biases when deciding while moving.

“…Overall, we replicated and extended previous work (Grießbach et al, 2023;Raßbach et al, 2021). That is, what might appear as a MC bias can-at least partially-be CC in disguise.…”

“…CC due to spatial features of concurrent movement had a notably smaller impact on decisions in Experiment 2 compared to prior studies (Grießbach et al, 2023; Raßbach et al, 2021) as well as Experiment 1 (and the online pilot study). This was likely due to the wider tracking lanes, allowing participants to counteract the perturbation with less frequent scrolling, as evidenced by the generally larger bird offset in the state analysis.…”

“…However, in natural behavior like walking, both aspects of the state are confounded. Consequently, what appeared to be a MC bias in previous paradigms (Grießbach et al, 2022;Kurtzer et al, 2020;Michalski et al, 2020) might have actually been-at least partially-a CC bias (Grießbach et al, 2023;Raßbach et al, 2021; but see Grießbach et al, 2022). RAẞBACH, GRIEẞBACH, CAÑAL-BRULAND, AND HERBORT 694…”

“…We set off to examine whether and how embodied decision biases due to MC (e.g., Grießbach et al, 2021Grießbach et al, , 2022Kurtzer et al, 2020;Michalski et al, 2020) as well as CC (Grießbach et al, 2023;Raßbach et al, 2021) are modulated by the preview time for rewards. The MLTT paradigm (Raßbach et al, 2021)-a computerized task simulating situated, embodied decisions-allowed us to disentangle MC from the cognitive state during movement.…”

Biomechanical Costs Influence Decisions Made During Ongoing Actions

“…Indeed, participants preferred avoiding an obstacle by doing a lateral step (i.e., less effortful option) rather than a cross-over step, sometimes even at the expense of gaining a higher reward (17). Similar biases have also been reported in a computer mouse tracking task (41), where participants most often chose movements with lower amplitude even if that option sometimes resulted in lower rewards (41, 42). It would be interesting to know whether their results would hold if the dynamics of alternative movements had been different.…”