ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2017
Overcoming indecision by changing the decision boundary.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beta-Blocker Propranolol Modulates Decision Urgency During Sequential Information Gathering.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2018Trial
- Contagious Effect of Nurses' Perception of Leaders' Antisocial Behaviour.Journal of advanced nursing · 2026Article
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- To Speak Up or Not to Speak Up, Organisational and Individual Antecedents That Undergird This Behaviour in Resource Constrained Region.Journal of advanced nursing · 2025Article
- Basal ganglia components have distinct computational roles in decision-making dynamics under conflict and uncertainty.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- The limits of metacognitive control during perceptual decision-making: opting out without improving accuracy.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Bayesian confidence in optimal decisions.Psychological review · 2024Article
- The neural network RTNet exhibits the signatures of human perceptual decision-making.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Expressions for Bayesian confidence of drift diffusion observers in fluctuating stimuli tasks.Journal of mathematical psychology · 2023Article
- Using cognitive modeling to examine the effects of competition on strategy and effort in races and tournaments.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
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- A theoretical analysis of the reward rate optimality of collapsing decision criteria.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2020Article
- Fast and slow errors: Logistic regression to identify patterns in accuracy-response time relationships.Behavior research methods · 2019Article
- Optimal models of decision-making in dynamic environments.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2019Review
- Optimal or not; depends on the task.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Article
- Time-varying decision boundaries: insights from optimality analysis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2018Review
- Deep Brain Stimulation of the Subthalamic Nucleus Does Not Affect the Decrease of Decision Threshold during the Choice Process When There Is No Conflict, Time Pressure, or Reward.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2018Article
- Mechanisms Underlying Decision-Making as Revealed by Deep-Brain Stimulation in Patients with Parkinson's Disease.Current biology : CB · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The dominant theoretical framework for decision making asserts that people make decisions by integrating noisy evidence to a threshold. It has recently been shown that in many ecologically realistic situations, decreasing the decision boundary maximizes the reward available from decisions. However, empirical support for decreasing boundaries in humans is scant. To investigate this problem, we used an ideal observer model to identify the conditions under which participants should change their decision boundaries with time to maximize reward rate. We conducted 6 expanded-judgment experiments that precisely matched the assumptions of this theoretical model. In this paradigm, participants could sample noisy, binary evidence presented sequentially. Blocks of trials were fixed in duration, and each trial was an independent reward opportunity. Participants therefore had to trade off speed (getting as many rewards as possible) against accuracy (sampling more evidence). Having access to the actual evidence samples experienced by participants enabled us to infer the slope of the decision boundary. We found that participants indeed modulated the slope of the decision boundary in the direction predicted by the ideal observer model, although we also observed systematic deviations from optimality. Participants using suboptimal boundaries do so in a robust manner, so that any error in their boundary setting is relatively inexpensive. The use of a normative model provides insight into what variable(s) human decision makers are trying to optimize. Furthermore, this normative model allowed us to choose diagnostic experiments and in doing so we present clear evidence for time-varying boundaries. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.