Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 32, Issue 11, Pages 3612-3628Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4010-11.2012
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [BCS0446730]
- Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Grant [N00014-07-1-0937]
- National Institute on Drug Abuse [BCS0346785]
- James S. McDonnell Foundation
- Spanish Ramon y Cajal program
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Decision making often involves the accumulation of information over time, but acquiring information typically comes at a cost. Little is known about the cost incurred by animals and humans for acquiring additional information from sensory variables due, for instance, to attentional efforts. Through a novel integration of diffusion models and dynamic programming, we were able to estimate the cost of making additional observations per unit of time from two monkeys and six humans in a reaction time (RT) random-dot motion discrimination task. Surprisingly, we find that the cost is neither zero nor constant over time, but for the animals and humans features a brief period in which it is constant but increases thereafter. In addition, we show that our theory accurately matches the observed reaction time distributions for each stimulus condition, the time-dependent choice accuracy both conditional on stimulus strength and independent of it, and choice accuracy and mean reaction times as a function of stimulus strength. The theory also correctly predicts that urgency signals in the brain should be independent of the difficulty, or stimulus strength, at each trial.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available