Value construction through sequential sampling explains serial dependencies in decision making.

Deciding between a pair of familiar items is thought to rely on a comparison of their subjective values. When the values are similar, decisions take longer, and the choice may be inconsistent with stated value. These regularities are thought to be explained by the same mechanism of noisy evidence accumulation that leads to perceptual errors under conditions of low signal to noise.

Direct observation of the neural computations underlying a single decision.

Neurobiological investigations of perceptual decision-making have furnished the first glimpse of a flexible cognitive process at the level of single neurons. Neurons in the parietal and prefrontal cortex are thought to represent the accumulation of noisy evidence, acquired over time, leading to a decision. Neural recordings averaged over many decisions have provided support for the deterministic rise in activity to a termination bound.

Value construction through sequential sampling explains serial dependencies in decision making.

Many decisions are expressed as a preference for one item over another. When these items are familiar, it is often assumed that the decision maker assigns a value to each of the items and chooses the item with the highest value. These values may be imperfectly recalled, but are assumed to be stable over the course of an interview or psychological experiment.

Population Representation of the Confidence in a Decision in the Lateral Intraparietal Area of the Macaque.

Confidence in a decision is the belief, prior to feedback, that one's choice is correct. In the brain, many decisions are implemented as a race between competing evidence-accumulation processes. We ask whether the neurons that represent evidence accumulation also carry information about whether the choice is correct (i.

Incorporation of a cost of deliberation time in perceptual decision making.

Many decisions benefit from the accumulation of evidence obtained sequentially over time. In such circumstances, the decision maker must balance speed against accuracy, and the nature of this tradeoff mediates competing desiderata and costs, especially those associated with the passage of time. A neural mechanism to achieve this balance is to accumulate evidence in suitable units and to terminate the deliberation when enough evidence has accrued.

Judging the difficulty of perceptual decisions.

Deciding how difficult it is going to be to perform a task allows us to choose between tasks, allocate appropriate resources, and predict future performance. To be useful for planning, difficulty judgments should not require completion of the task. Here, we examine the processes underlying difficulty judgments in a perceptual decision-making task.

Judging the difficulty of perceptual decisions.

Deciding how difficult it is going to be to perform a task allows us to choose between tasks, allocate appropriate resources, and predict future performance. To be useful for planning, difficulty judgments should not require completion of the task. Here we examine the processes underlying difficulty judgments in a perceptual decision making task.

Consensus Goals in the Field of Visual Metacognition.

Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term common goals.

Sequential sampling from memory underlies action selection during abstract decision-making.

The study of perceptual decision-making in monkeys has provided insights into the process by which sensory evidence is integrated toward a decision. When monkeys make decisions with the knowledge of the motor actions the decisions bear upon, the process of evidence integration is instantiated by neurons involved in the selection of said actions. It is less clear how monkeys make decisions when unaware of the actions required to communicate their choice-what we refer to as "abstract" decisions.

Decision prioritization and causal reasoning in decision hierarchies.

From cooking a meal to finding a route to a destination, many real life decisions can be decomposed into a hierarchy of sub-decisions. In a hierarchy, choosing which decision to think about requires planning over a potentially vast space of possible decision sequences. To gain insight into how people decide what to decide on, we studied a novel task that combines perceptual decision making, active sensing and hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning.

Multiple decisions about one object involve parallel sensory acquisition but time-multiplexed evidence incorporation.

The brain is capable of processing several streams of information that bear on different aspects of the same problem. Here, we address the problem of making two decisions about one object, by studying difficult perceptual decisions about the color and motion of a dynamic random dot display. We find that the accuracy of one decision is unaffected by the difficulty of the other decision.

Differentiating between integration and non-integration strategies in perceptual decision making.

Many tasks used to study decision-making encourage subjects to integrate evidence over time. Such tasks are useful to understand how the brain operates on multiple samples of information over prolonged timescales, but only if subjects actually integrate evidence to form their decisions. We explored the behavioral observations that corroborate evidence-integration in a number of task-designs.

The Confidence Database.

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages.

The hippocampus supports deliberation during value-based decisions.

Choosing between two items involves deliberation and comparison of the features of each item and its value. Such decisions take more time when choosing between options of similar value, possibly because these decisions require more evidence, but the mechanisms involved are not clear. We propose that the hippocampus supports deliberation about value, given its well-known role in prospection and relational cognition.

Counterfactual Reasoning Underlies the Learning of Priors in Decision Making.

Accurate decisions require knowledge of prior probabilities (e.g., prevalence or base rate), but it is unclear how prior probabilities are learned in the absence of a teacher.

Serial, parallel and hierarchical decision making in primates.

The study of decision-making has mainly focused on isolated decisions where choices are associated with motor actions. However, problem-solving often involves considering a hierarchy of sub-decisions. In a recent study (Lorteije et al.

Confidence Is the Bridge between Multi-stage Decisions.

Demanding tasks often require a series of decisions to reach a goal. Recent progress in perceptual decision-making has served to unite decision accuracy, speed, and confidence in a common framework of bounded evidence accumulation, furnishing a platform for the study of such multi-stage decisions. In many instances, the strategy applied to each decision, such as the speed-accuracy trade-off, ought to depend on the accuracy of the previous decisions.

The influence of evidence volatility on choice, reaction time and confidence in a perceptual decision.

Many decisions are thought to arise via the accumulation of noisy evidence to a threshold or bound. In perception, the mechanism explains the effect of stimulus strength, characterized by signal-to-noise ratio, on decision speed, accuracy and confidence. It also makes intriguing predictions about the noise itself.

Comment on "Single-trial spike trains in parietal cortex reveal discrete steps during decision-making".

Latimeret al (Reports, 10 July 2015, p. 184) claim that during perceptual decision formation, parietal neurons undergo one-time, discrete steps in firing rate instead of gradual changes that represent the accumulation of evidence. However, that conclusion rests on unsubstantiated assumptions about the time window of evidence accumulation, and their stepping model cannot explain existing data as effectively as evidence-accumulation models.

Confidence through consensus: a neural mechanism for uncertainty monitoring.

Models that integrate sensory evidence to a threshold can explain task accuracy, response times and confidence, yet it is still unclear how confidence is encoded in the brain. Classic models assume that confidence is encoded in some form of balance between the evidence integrated in favor and against the selected option. However, recent experiments that measure the sensory evidence's influence on choice and confidence contradict these classic models.

A common mechanism underlies changes of mind about decisions and confidence.

Decisions are accompanied by a degree of confidence that a selected option is correct. A sequential sampling framework explains the speed and accuracy of decisions and extends naturally to the confidence that the decision rendered is likely to be correct. However, discrepancies between confidence and accuracy suggest that confidence might be supported by mechanisms dissociated from the decision process.

Individual consistency in the accuracy and distribution of confidence judgments.

We examine which aspects of the confidence distributions - its shape, its bias toward higher or lower values, and its ability to distinguish correct from erred trials - are idiosyncratic of the who (individual specificity), the when (variability across days) and the what (task specificity). Measuring confidence across different sessions of four different perceptual tasks we show that: (1) Confidence distributions are virtually identical when measured in different days for the same subject and the same task, constituting a subjective fingerprint, (2) The capacity of confidence reports to distinguish correct from incorrect responses is only modestly (but significantly) correlated when compared across tasks, (3) Confidence distributions are very similar for tasks that involve different sensory modalities but have similar structure, (4) Confidence accuracy is independent of the mean and width of the confidence distribution, (5) The mean of the confidence distribution (an individual's confidence bias) constitutes the most efficient indicator to infer a subject's identity from confidence reports and (6) Confidence bias measured in simple perceptual decisions correlates with an individual's optimism bias measured with standard questionnaire.

The Formation of Hierarchical Decisions in the Visual Cortex.

Intelligence relies on our ability to find appropriate sequences of decisions in complex problem spaces. The efficiency of a problem solver depends on the speed of its individual decisions and the number of decisions it can explore in parallel. It remains unknown whether the primate brain can consider multiple decisions at the same time.

Variance misperception explains illusions of confidence in simple perceptual decisions.

Confidence in a perceptual decision is a judgment about the quality of the sensory evidence. The quality of the evidence depends not only on its strength ('signal') but critically on its reliability ('noise'), but the separate contribution of these quantities to the formation of confidence judgments has not been investigated before in the context of perceptual decisions. We studied subjective confidence reports in a multi-element perceptual task where evidence strength and reliability could be manipulated independently.

When order matters: last-come first-served effect in sequential arithmetic operations.

Cognitive psychologists have relied on dual-task interference experiments to understand the low-capacity and serial nature of conscious mental operations. Two widely studied paradigms, the Attentional Blink (AB) and the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) have demonstrated a first-come first-served policy; processing a stimulus either impedes conscious access (AB) or postpones treatment (PRP) of a concurrent stimulus. Here we explored the transition from dual-task paradigms to multi-step human cognition.