ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2019
Optimal or not; depends on the task.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Autistic and non-autistic children's perceptual decision-making in visual orientation and motion tasks and the effect of task instructions.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- People are at least as good at optimizing reward rate under equivalent fixed-trial compared to fixed-time conditions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- The temporal dynamics of metacognitive experiences track rational adaptations in task performance.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The neural network RTNet exhibits the signatures of human perceptual decision-making.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Uncovering the cognitive mechanisms underlying the gaze cueing effect.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2024Article
- Are there jumps in evidence accumulation, and what, if anything, do they reflect psychologically? An analysis of Lévy Flights models of decision-making.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Behavioural and neural indices of perceptual decision-making in autistic children during visual motion tasks.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Modeling evidence accumulation decision processes using integral equations: Urgency-gating and collapsing boundaries.Psychological review · 2022Article
- Computational modeling reveals strategic and developmental differences in the behavioral impact of reward across adolescence.Developmental science · 2022Article
- Visual Motion and Decision-Making in Dyslexia: Reduced Accumulation of Sensory Evidence and Related Neural Dynamics.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Preregistration in diverse contexts: a preregistration template for the application of cognitive models.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- How is multi-tasking different from increased difficulty?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Review
- A theoretical analysis of the reward rate optimality of collapsing decision criteria.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2020Article
- A method, framework, and tutorial for efficiently simulating models of decision-making.Behavior research methods · 2019Article
- Assessing the practical differences between model selection methods in inferences about choice response time tasks.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Decision-making involves a tradeoff between pressures for caution and urgency. Previous research has investigated how well humans optimize this tradeoff, and mostly concluded that people adopt a sub-optimal strategy that over-emphasizes caution. This emphasis reduces how many decisions can be made in a fixed time, which reduces the "reward rate". However, the strategy that is optimal depends critically on the timing properties of the experiment design: the slower the rate of decision opportunities, the more cautious the optimal strategy. Previous studies have almost uniformly adopted very fast designs, which favor very urgent decision-making. This raises the possibility that previous findings-that humans adopt strategies that are too cautious-could either be ascribed to human caution, or to the experiments' design. To test this, we used a slowed-down decision-making task in which the optimal strategy was quite cautious. With this task, and in contrast to previous findings, the average strategy adopted across participants was very close to optimal, with about equally many participants adopting too-cautious as too-urgent strategies. Our findings suggest that task design can play a role in inferences about optimality, and that previous conclusions regarding human sub-optimality are conditional on the task settings. This limits claims about human optimality that can be supported by the available evidence.
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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.