Mechanism of making a decision when pieces of evidence are conferred by temporally separated cues

Background and Aim: Most of our real-life decisions are made based on pieces of evidence conferred by temporally separated cues. However, in spite of real-life scenarios, most studies targeted to investigate brain mechanisms of decision making, assumed the stream of information to be continuous. Thus, the neural mechanisms underlying the integration of temporally discrete evidence to make a decision are obscure. Methods We designed and implemented a set of psychophysical experiments in which participants were instructed to make a decision about the direction of movement in a randomly moving dot stimulus (RDM). We then compared the performance and reaction time of making a decision in a continuous environment with that in the discrete environment. Finally, we investigated how well both sequential sampling and neurally-informed models of decision making can explain the process of decision making in both continuous and discrete tasks. Results: In this study, we try to delve deeper into the mechanisms of making decisions when the information stream is discretized due to the temporal gap placed between pulses of evidence. Conclusion: Our results, consistent with previous studies, show that performance is independent of the temporal gap between pulses of evidence, however, reaction time is significantly affected. Computational modeling results indicate that both Sequential sampling and neurally-informed attractor based models need revisions to be accounted for the process of decision making in the discrete environment.

کلیدواژه ها:

Perceptual decision making ، Computational modeling ، Discrete evidence ، Performance ، Reaction time