ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Gain control explains the effect of distraction in human perceptual, cognitive, and economic decision making.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modulation of response inhibition with event-related atVNS showed EEG but no behavioral effects.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Unexpected higher resilience to distraction during visual working memory in schizophrenia.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Examining the replicability of online experiments selected by a decision market.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Valuations of target items are drawn towards unavailable decoy items due to prior expectations.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Neurophysiological insights into sequential decision-making: exploring the secretary problem through ERPs and TBR dynamics.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Multifaceted consequences of visual distraction during natural behaviour.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Interpersonal alignment of neural evidence accumulation to social exchange of confidence.eLife · 2023Article
- Task state representations in vmPFC mediate relevant and irrelevant value signals and their behavioral influence.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Article
- How do (perceptual) distracters distract?PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Efficiently irrational: deciphering the riddle of human choice.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2022Review
- High-value decisions are fast and accurate, inconsistent with diminishing value sensitivity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Response-locked classification image analysis of perceptual decision making in contrast detection.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Neural tuning and representational geometry.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2021Review
- Exploring the Dimensions of Smartphone Distraction: Development, Validation, Measurement Invariance, and Latent Mean Differences of the Smartphone Distraction Scale (SDS).Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- A map of decoy influence in human multialternative choice.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Experimentally revealed stochastic preferences for multicomponent choice options.Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition · 2020Article
- Article
- Value-based attention but not divisive normalization influences decisions with multiple alternatives.Nature human behaviour · 2020Article
- Perception and decision mechanisms involved in average estimation of spatiotemporal ensembles.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
When making decisions, humans are often distracted by irrelevant information. Distraction has a different impact on perceptual, cognitive, and value-guided choices, giving rise to well-described behavioral phenomena such as the tilt illusion, conflict adaptation, or economic decoy effects. However, a single, unified model that can account for all these phenomena has yet to emerge. Here, we offer one such account, based on adaptive gain control, and additionally show that it successfully predicts a range of counterintuitive new behavioral phenomena on variants of a classic cognitive paradigm, the Eriksen flanker task. We also report that blood oxygen level-dependent signals in a dorsal network prominently including the anterior cingulate cortex index a gain-modulated decision variable predicted by the model. This work unifies the study of distraction across perceptual, cognitive, and economic domains.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.