ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
High-value decisions are fast and accurate, inconsistent with diminishing value sensitivity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 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
21 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Delayed reward information is underweighted in reinforcement learning with dispersed feedback.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Challenging the mechanism for the implicit association test.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Choice-induced preference change under a sequential sampling model framework.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Misspecified models create the appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Behavioral Signatures of Post-Decisional Attention in Preferential Choice.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Cognitive decision-making strategies in a haptic angle sorting task: a behavioral experimental study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural Oscillation as a Selective Modulatory Mechanism on Decision Confidence, Speed, and Accuracy.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Early versus late noise differentially enhances or degrades context-dependent choice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The timescale and direction of influence of a third inferior alternative in human value-learning.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Decision makers consider all options in choice triplets.PloS one · 2025Article
- High stakes slow responding, but do not help overcome Pavlovian biases in humans.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Measuring utility with diffusion models.Science advances · 2023Article
- Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Value certainty and choice confidence are multidimensional constructs that guide decision-making.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- The neural correlates of value representation: From single items to bundles.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- EEG-representational geometries and psychometric distortions in approximate numerical judgment.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- On multiple sources of value sensitivity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is a widely held belief that people's choices are less sensitive to changes in value as value increases. For example, the subjective difference between $11 and $12 is believed to be smaller than between $1 and $2. This idea is consistent with applications of the Weber-Fechner Law and divisive normalization to value-based choice and with psychological interpretations of diminishing marginal utility. According to random utility theory in economics, smaller subjective differences predict less accurate choices. Meanwhile, in the context of sequential sampling models in psychology, smaller subjective differences also predict longer response times. Based on these models, we would predict decisions between high-value options to be slower and less accurate. In contrast, some have argued on normative grounds that choices between high-value options should be made with less caution, leading to faster and less accurate choices. Here, we model the dynamics of the choice process across three different choice domains, accounting for both discriminability and response caution. Contrary to predictions, we mostly observe faster and more accurate decisions (i.e., higher drift rates) between high-value options. We also observe that when participants are alerted about incoming high-value decisions, they exert more caution and not less. We rule out several explanations for these results, using tasks with both subjective and objective values. These results cast doubt on the notion that increasing value reduces discriminability.
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.