Evidence accumulation account of human operators' decisions in intermittent control during inverted pendulum balancing

Human operators often employ intermittent, discontinuous control strategies in a variety of tasks. A typical intermittent controller monitors control error and generates corrective action when the deviation of the controlled system from the desired state becomes too large to ignore. Most contemporary models of human intermittent control employ simple, threshold-based trigger mechanism to model the process of control activation. However, recent experimental studies demonstrate that the control activation patterns produced by human operators do not support threshold-based models, and provide evidence for more complex activation mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate whether intermittent control activation in humans can be modeled as a decision-making process. We utilize an established drift-diffusion model, which treats decision making as an evidence accumulation process, and study it in simple numerical simulations. We demonstrate that this model robustly replicates the control activation patterns (distributions of control error at movement onset) produced by human operators in previously conducted experiments on virtual inverted pendulum balancing. Our results provide support to the hypothesis that intermittent control activation in human operators can be treated as an evidence accumulation process.