A multitude of models have been proposed to account for the neural mechanism of value integration and decision making in speeded decision tasks. While most of these models account for existing data, they largely disagree on a fundamental characteristic of the choice mechanism: independent versus different types of competitive processing. Five…

If the diffusion model (Ratcliff & McKoon, 2008) is to account for the relative speeds of correct responses and errors, it is necessary that the components of processing identified by the model vary across the trials of a task. In standard applications, the rate at which information is accumulated by the diffusion process is assumed to be normally…

Gonzalez and Dutt (2011) recently reported that trends during sampling, prior to a consequential risky decision, reveal a gradual movement from exploration to exploitation. That is, even when search imposes no immediate costs, people adopt the same pattern manifest in costly search: early exploration followed by later exploitation. From this…

Hills and Hertwig (2012) challenge the proposed similarity of the exploration-exploitation transitions found in Gonzalez and Dutt (2011) between the 2 experimental paradigms of decisions from experience (sampling and repeated-choice), which was predicted by an instance-based learning (IBL) model. The heart of their argument is that in the sampling…

Models of decision making are distinguished by those that aim for an optimal solution in a world that is precisely specified by a set of assumptions (a so-called "small world") and those that aim for a simple but satisfactory solution in an uncertain world where the assumptions of optimization models may not be met (a so-called "large world"). Few…

We present a new model for the general study of how the truth and biases affect human judgment. In the truth and bias model, judgments about the world are pulled by 2 primary forces, the truth force and the bias force, and these 2 forces are interrelated. The truth and bias model differentiates force and value, where the force is the strength of…

Many theories of human cognition postulate that people are equipped with a repertoire of strategies to solve the tasks they face. This theoretical framework of a cognitive toolbox provides a plausible account of intra- and interindividual differences in human behavior. Unfortunately, it is often unclear how to rigorously test the toolbox…

In their influential "Psychological Review" article, Bogacz, Brown, Moehlis, Holmes, and Cohen (2006) discussed optimal decision making as accomplished by the drift diffusion model (DDM). The authors showed that neural inhibition models, such as the leaky competing accumulator model (LCA) and the feedforward inhibition model (FFI), can mimic the…

Transitivity of preferences is a fundamental principle shared by most major contemporary rational, prescriptive, and descriptive models of decision making. To have transitive preferences, a person, group, or society that prefers choice option "x" to "y" and "y" to "z" must prefer "x" to…

How do people select among different strategies to accomplish a given task? Across disciplines, the strategy selection problem represents a major challenge. We propose a quantitative model that predicts how selection emerges through the interplay among strategies, cognitive capacities, and the environment. This interplay carves out for each…

Recent research has argued that several well-known judgment biases may be due to biases in the available information sample rather than to biased information processing. Most of these sample-based explanations assume that decision makers are "naive": They are not aware of the biases in the available information sample and do not correct for them.…

Tsetsos, Usher, and Chater (2010) presented several criticisms of decision field theory (DFT) involving its distance function, instability under externally controlled stopping times, and lack of robustness to various multialternative choice scenarios. Here, we counter those claims with a specification of a distance function based on the…

In this post scrit, the authors discuss an article by Hotaling, Busemeyer, and Li which provided a valuable reply to the challenges the current authors raised for the decision field theory (DFT) account of preference reversal in multiattribute choice. They agree with Hotaling, Busemeyer, and Li's observation that with the addition of an internal…

Measures of human efficiency under increases in mental workload or attentional limitations are vital in studying human perception, cognition, and action. Assays of efficiency as workload changes have typically been confined to either reaction times (RTs) or accuracy alone. Within the realm of RTs, a nonparametric measure called the "workload…

Recent work has given rise to the view that reward-based decision making is governed by two key controllers: a habit system, which stores stimulus-response associations shaped by past reward, and a goal-oriented system that selects actions based on their anticipated outcomes. The current literature provides a rich body of computational theory…