The Cost of Accumulating Evidence in Perceptual Decision Making
Open accessAbstract
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.
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The factors that determine when to stop gathering information and commit to a final decision, as well as which options to sample from, remain an active area of investigation.
“the factors that determine when to stop gathering information and commit to a final decision, as well as which options to sample from, remain an active area of investigation1,4,9–11.”
From Interpretable abstractions of artificial neural networks predict behavior and neural activity during human information gathering (2026) · cites this paper as [4]
A flat decision bound does not capture the shape of the reaction-time distributions and the mean reaction time on error trials.
“For analytic simplicity (see below), we used a flat bound (i.e., stationary rather than collapsing), which does not capture the shape of the RT distributions and the mean RT on error trials (Drugowitsch et al., 2012).”
From A common mechanism underlies changes of mind about decisions and confidence (2016) · cites this paper as Drugowitsch et al., 2012
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- Authors
- Drugowitsch, J., Moreno-Bote, R., Churchland, A. K., Shadlen, M. N., & Pouget, A.
- Affiliations
- Inserm (FR)
- University of Geneva (CH)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Venue
- The Journal of Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Society for Neuroscience
- Published
- 2012-03-14
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 3612-3628
- ISSN
- 0270-6474 (ISSN-L)
- 1529-2401
- PMC
- PMC3329788
- OpenAlex
- W2129641119
- Cited by
- 577
- References
- 46
- Citations by year
- 2026: 34 · 2025: 44 · 2024: 53 · 2023: 62 · 2022: 40 · 2021: 44 · 2020: 43 · 2019: 45 · 2018: 40 · 2017: 30 · 2016: 41 · 2015: 37 · 2014: 36 · 2013: 20 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 16.56
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Archive ouverte UNIGE (University of Geneva) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Institutional Repository (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion)
- Archive ouverte UNIGE (University of Geneva) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (0446730)
- James S. McDonnell Foundation
- Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (N00014-07-1-0937)
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA022780)
- National Eye Institute (R00EY019072)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- perceptual decision making, evidence accumulation, attentional effort, diffusion models, dynamic programming, reaction time distribution, stimulus strength, choice accuracy, monkeys, human
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Haplorhini, Choice Behavior, Costs and Cost Analysis, Decision Making, Female, Humans, Male, Motion Perception, Photic Stimulation, Psychomotor Performance, Random Allocation, Reaction Time
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