Models, movements, and minds: bridging the gap between decision making and action

Decision making is a fundamental cognitive function, which not only determines our day-to-day choices but also shapes the trajectories of our movements, our lives, and our societies. While immense progress has been made in recent years on our understanding of the mechanisms underlying decision making, research on this topic is still largely split into two halves. Good-based models largely state that decisions are made between representations of abstract value associated with available options; while action-based models largely state that decisions are made at the level of action representations. These models are further divided between those that state that a decision is made before an action is specified, and those that regard decision making as an evolving process that continues until movement completion. Here, we review computational models, behavioral findings, and results from neural recordings associated with these frameworks. In synthesizing this literature, we submit that decision making is best understood as a continuous, graded, and distributed process that traverses a landscape of behaviorally relevant options, from their presentation until movement completion. Identifying and understanding the intimate links between decision making and action processing has important implications for the study of complex, goal-directed behaviors such as social communication, and for elucidating the underlying mechanisms by which decisions are formed.