Of monkeys and men: Impatience in perceptual decision-making

Abstract

For decades sequential sampling models have successfully accounted for human and monkey decision-making, relying on the standard assumption that decision makers maintain a pre-set decision standard throughout the decision process. Based on the theoretical argument of reward rate maximization, some authors have recently suggested that decision makers become increasingly impatient as time passes and therefore lower their decision standard. Indeed, a number of studies show that computational models with an impatience component provide a good fit to human and monkey decision behavior. However, many of these studies lack quantitative model comparisons and systematic manipulations of rewards. Moreover, the often-cited evidence from single-cell recordings is not unequivocal and complimentary data from human subjects is largely missing. We conclude that, despite some enthusiastic calls for the abandonment of the standard model, the idea of an impatience component has yet to be fully established; we suggest a number of recently developed tools that will help bring the debate to a conclusive settlement.

Not all Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off Manipulations Have the Same Psychological Effect

“…First, we provide empirical evidence supporting Frazier and Yu's (2008) thesis, which predicted that when humans are faced with deadlines, decision-makers require less evidence to commit to a decision as time passes. This is in line with previous work suggesting that decisions for which not enough evidence can be obtained in the allotted time are characterized by collapsing thresholds (Boehm et al 2016;Evans et al in press;Hawkins et al 2015a;Hawkins et al 2015b;Miletić and van Maanen 2019;Murphy et al 2016). It is important to note, however, that our modeling analyses did not address the question of whether people followed an optimal or a suboptimal decision policy.…”

Global gain modulation generates time-dependent urgency during perceptual choice in humans

“…Theoretical considerations suggest that such a time-invariant policy is sub-optimal if the potential cost of continued evidence accumulation grows with elapsed decision time, as is often the case in decision-making contexts that place a premium on fast responding1820. Yet, in support of the principle of time-invariance, recent reports have suggested that human decision-makers may fail to implement a dynamic, time-variant commitment policy that would yield higher reward rates in such settings152930. In the present study, we describe strong, convergent evidence to the contrary.…”

“…While these findings have illuminated the mechanistic basis of SAT regulation in non-human primates, time-invariance remains a dominant assumption in the human decision-making literature10 and recent empirical and model comparison reports have reinforced this stance15293031. Moreover, even in non-human primates, little is known about the neurophysiological source of urgency.…”

Visual Decision-Making in an Uncertain and Dynamic World

“…The rationale for using this rule has included emphasizing other goals that can depend strongly on context, including reducing computational costs, promoting urgency, or recalibrating the decision process to account for uncertain evidence and unequal prior probabilities (Ditterich 2006, Brown & Heathcote 2008, Cisek et al 2009, Hanks et al 2011, Drugowitsch et al 2012, Murphy et al 2016). However, whether and when such a mechanism explains behavioral data more effectively than a fixed bound remains an open debate (Boehm et al 2016).…”