Speed–accuracy trade-offs and individually consistent decision making by individuals and dyads of zebrafish in a colour discrimination task

Majority-voting and the Condorcet Jury Theorem pervade thinking about collective decision-making. Thus, it is typically assumed that majority-voting is the best possible decision mechanism, and that scenarios exist where individually-weak decision-makers should not pool information. Condorcet and its applications implicitly assume that only one kind of error can be made, yet signal detection theory shows two kinds of errors exist, ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives’. We apply signal detection theory to collective decision-making to show that majority voting is frequently sub-optimal, and can be optimally replaced by quorum decision-making. While quorums have been proposed to resolve within-group conflicts, or manage speed-accuracy trade-offs, our analysis applies to groups with aligned interests undertaking single-shot decisions. Our results help explain the ubiquity of quorum decision-making in nature, relate the use of sub- and super-majority quorums to decision ecology, and may inform the design of artificial decision-making systems.Impact StatementTheory typically assumes that majority voting is optimal; this is incorrect – majority voting is typically sub-optimal, and should be replaced by sub-majority or super-majority quorum voting. This helps explain the prevalence of quorum-sensing in even the simplest collective systems, such as bacterial communities.

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Context-Dependent Urgency Influences Speed–Accuracy Trade-Offs in Decision-Making and Movement Execution

Journal of Neuroscience ◽

10.1523/jneurosci.0162-14.2014 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 34 (49) ◽

pp. 16442-16454 ◽

Cited By ~ 46

Author(s):

David Thura ◽

Ignasi Cos ◽

Jessica Trung ◽

Paul Cisek

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Movement Execution ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Context Dependent ◽

Speed Accuracy

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Linking behavioural syndromes and cognition: a behavioural ecology perspective

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2012.0216 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 367 (1603) ◽

pp. 2762-2772 ◽

Cited By ~ 308

Author(s):

Andrew Sih ◽

Marco Del Giudice

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Individual Differences ◽

Behavioural Ecology ◽

Risk Sensitivity ◽

Model Species ◽

Behavioural Syndromes ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Behavioural Types ◽

Cognitive Speed ◽

Speed Accuracy

With the exception of a few model species, individual differences in cognition remain relatively unstudied in non-human animals. One intriguing possibility is that variation in cognition is functionally related to variation in personality. Here, we review some examples and present hypotheses on relationships between personality (or behavioural syndromes) and individual differences in cognitive style. Our hypotheses are based largely on a connection between fast–slow behavioural types (BTs; e.g. boldness, aggressiveness, exploration tendency) and cognitive speed–accuracy trade-offs. We also discuss connections between BTs, cognition and ecologically important aspects of decision-making, including sampling, impulsivity, risk sensitivity and choosiness. Finally, we introduce the notion of cognition syndromes, and apply ideas from theories on adaptive behavioural syndromes to generate predictions on cognition syndromes.

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A Diffusion Model Approach for Understanding the Impact of 17 Interventions on the Race Implicit Association Test

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin ◽

10.1177/0146167220974489 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 014616722097448

Author(s):

Jessica Röhner ◽

Calvin K. Lai

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Implicit Association Test ◽

Association Test ◽

Implicit Measure ◽

Implicit Association ◽

Implicit Measures ◽

Long Term Effects ◽

Trade Offs ◽

The Impact ◽

Speed Accuracy

Performance on implicit measures reflects construct-specific and nonconstruct-specific processes. This creates an interpretive issue for understanding interventions to change implicit measures: Change in performance could reflect changes in the constructs of interest or changes in other mental processes. We reanalyzed data from six studies ( N = 23,342) to examine the process-level effects of 17 interventions and one sham intervention to change race implicit association test (IAT) performance. Diffusion models decompose overall IAT performance ( D-scores) into construct-specific (ease of decision-making) and nonconstruct-specific processes (speed–accuracy trade-offs, non-decision-related processes like motor execution). Interventions that effectively reduced D-scores changed ease of decision-making on compatible and incompatible trials. They also eliminated differences in speed–accuracy trade-offs between compatible and incompatible trials. Non-decision-related processes were affected by two interventions only. There was little evidence that interventions had any long-term effects. These findings highlight the value of diffusion modeling for understanding the mechanisms by which interventions affect implicit measure performance.

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Speed versus accuracy in decision-making ants: expediting politics and policy implementation

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2008.0224 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 364 (1518) ◽

pp. 845-852 ◽

Cited By ~ 57

Author(s):

Nigel R Franks ◽

François-Xavier Dechaume-Moncharmont ◽

Emma Hanmore ◽

Jocelyn K Reynolds

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Quorum Sensing ◽

Policy Implementation ◽

Positive Feedback ◽

High Speed ◽

Collective Decision ◽

Collective Decision Making ◽

Tandem Running ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Speed Accuracy

Compromises between speed and accuracy are seemingly inevitable in decision-making when accuracy depends on time-consuming information gathering. In collective decision-making, such compromises are especially likely because information is shared to determine corporate policy. This political process will also take time. Speed–accuracy trade-offs occur among house-hunting rock ants, Temnothorax albipennis . A key aspect of their decision-making is quorum sensing in a potential new nest. Finding a sufficient number of nest-mates, i.e. a quorum threshold (QT), in a potential nest site indicates that many ants find it suitable. Quorum sensing collates information. However, the QT is also used as a switch, from recruitment of nest-mates to their new home by slow tandem running, to recruitment by carrying, which is three times faster. Although tandem running is slow, it effectively enables one successful ant to lead and teach another the route between the nests. Tandem running creates positive feedback; more and more ants are shown the way, as tandem followers become, in turn, tandem leaders. The resulting corps of trained ants can then quickly carry their nest-mates; but carried ants do not learn the route. Therefore, the QT seems to set both the amount of information gathered and the speed of the emigration. Low QTs might cause more errors and a slower emigration—the worst possible outcome. This possible paradox of quick decisions leading to slow implementation might be resolved if the ants could deploy another positive-feedback recruitment process when they have used a low QT. Reverse tandem runs occur after carrying has begun and lead ants back from the new nest to the old one. Here we show experimentally that reverse tandem runs can bring lost scouts into an active role in emigrations and can help to maintain high-speed emigrations. Thus, in rock ants, although quick decision-making and rapid implementation of choices are initially in opposition, a third recruitment method can restore rapid implementation after a snap decision. This work reveals a principle of widespread importance: the dynamics of collective decision-making (i.e. the politics) and the dynamics of policy implementation are sometimes intertwined, and only by analysing the mechanisms of both can we understand certain forms of adaptive organization.

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Tuning the speed-accuracy trade-off to maximize reward rate in multisensory decision-making

eLife ◽

10.7554/elife.06678 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

Cited By ~ 29

Author(s):

Jan Drugowitsch ◽

Gregory C DeAngelis ◽

Dora E Angelaki ◽

Alexandre Pouget

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Time Pressure ◽

Human Subjects ◽

Neural Population ◽

Trade Off ◽

Reward Rate ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Sensory Modalities ◽

Effective Decision Making ◽

Speed Accuracy

For decisions made under time pressure, effective decision making based on uncertain or ambiguous evidence requires efficient accumulation of evidence over time, as well as appropriately balancing speed and accuracy, known as the speed/accuracy trade-off. For simple unimodal stimuli, previous studies have shown that human subjects set their speed/accuracy trade-off to maximize reward rate. We extend this analysis to situations in which information is provided by multiple sensory modalities. Analyzing previously collected data (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="bib4">Drugowitsch et al., 2014</xref>), we show that human subjects adjust their speed/accuracy trade-off to produce near-optimal reward rates. This trade-off can change rapidly across trials according to the sensory modalities involved, suggesting that it is represented by neural population codes rather than implemented by slow neuronal mechanisms such as gradual changes in synaptic weights. Furthermore, we show that deviations from the optimal speed/accuracy trade-off can be explained by assuming an incomplete gradient-based learning of these trade-offs.

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Motion-guided attention promotes adaptive communications during social navigation

Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rspb.2012.2003 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 280 (1754) ◽

pp. 20122003 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

B. H. Lemasson ◽

J. J. Anderson ◽

R. A. Goodwin

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Visual Information ◽

Social Cues ◽

Individual Risk ◽

Limited Attention ◽

Uncertain Environments ◽

Social Navigation ◽

Social Coordination ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Speed Accuracy

Animals are capable of enhanced decision making through cooperation, whereby accurate decisions can occur quickly through decentralized consensus. These interactions often depend upon reliable social cues, which can result in highly coordinated activities in uncertain environments. Yet information within a crowd may be lost in translation, generating confusion and enhancing individual risk. As quantitative data detailing animal social interactions accumulate, the mechanisms enabling individuals to rapidly and accurately process competing social cues remain unresolved. Here, we model how motion-guided attention influences the exchange of visual information during social navigation. We also compare the performance of this mechanism to the hypothesis that robust social coordination requires individuals to numerically limit their attention to a set of n -nearest neighbours. While we find that such numerically limited attention does not generate robust social navigation across ecological contexts, several notable qualities arise from selective attention to motion cues. First, individuals can instantly become a local information hub when startled into action, without requiring changes in neighbour attention level. Second, individuals can circumvent speed–accuracy trade-offs by tuning their motion thresholds. In turn, these properties enable groups to collectively dampen or amplify social information. Lastly, the minority required to sway a group's short-term directional decisions can change substantially with social context. Our findings suggest that motion-guided attention is a fundamental and efficient mechanism underlying collaborative decision making during social navigation.

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Quantifying the benefits of using decision models with response time and accuracy data

Behavior Research Methods ◽

10.3758/s13428-020-01372-w ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 52 (5) ◽

pp. 2142-2155 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Tom Stafford ◽

Angelo Pirrone ◽

Mike Croucher ◽

Anna Krystalli

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Response Time ◽

Drift Rate ◽

Behavioral Science ◽

Decision Models ◽

Group Differences ◽

Decision Modeling ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Typical Experiment ◽

Speed Accuracy

Abstract Response time and accuracy are fundamental measures of behavioral science, but discerning participants’ underlying abilities can be masked by speed–accuracy trade-offs (SATOs). SATOs are often inadequately addressed in experiment analyses which focus on a single variable or which involve a suboptimal analytic correction. Models of decision-making, such as the drift diffusion model (DDM), provide a principled account of the decision-making process, allowing the recovery of SATO-unconfounded decision parameters from observed behavioral variables. For plausible parameters of a typical between-groups experiment, we simulate experimental data, for both real and null group differences in participants’ ability to discriminate stimuli (represented by differences in the drift rate parameter of the DDM used to generate the simulated data), for both systematic and null SATOs. We then use the DDM to fit the generated data. This allows the direct comparison of the specificity and sensitivity for testing of group differences of different measures (accuracy, reaction time, and the drift rate from the model fitting). Our purpose here is not to make a theoretical innovation in decision modeling, but to use established decision models to demonstrate and quantify the benefits of decision modeling for experimentalists. We show, in terms of reduction of required sample size, how decision modeling can allow dramatically more efficient data collection for set statistical power; we confirm and depict the non-linear speed–accuracy relation; and we show how accuracy can be a more sensitive measure than response time given decision parameters which reasonably reflect a typical experiment.

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Noise, cost and speed-accuracy trade-offs: decision-making in a decentralized system

Journal of The Royal Society Interface ◽

10.1098/rsif.2005.0075 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 3 (7) ◽

pp. 243-254 ◽

Cited By ~ 44

Author(s):

James A.R Marshall ◽

Anna Dornhaus ◽

Nigel R Franks ◽

Tim Kovacs

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Control Algorithm ◽

Temnothorax Albipennis ◽

Decentralized System ◽

Nest Sites ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Decentralized Decision Making ◽

Decision Making System ◽

Speed Accuracy ◽

Speed And Accuracy

Many natural and artificial decision-making systems face decision problems where there is an inherent compromise between two or more objectives. One such common compromise is between the speed and accuracy of a decision. The ability to exploit the characteristics of a decision problem in order to vary between the extremes of making maximally rapid, or maximally accurate decisions, is a useful property of such systems. Colonies of the ant Temnothorax albipennis (formerly Leptothorax albipennis ) are a paradigmatic decentralized decision-making system, and have been shown flexibly to compromise accuracy for speed when making decisions during house-hunting. During emigration, a colony must typically evaluate and choose between several possible alternative new nest sites of differing quality. In this paper, we examine this speed-accuracy trade-off through modelling, and conclude that noise and time-cost of assessing alternative choices are likely to be significant for T. albipennis . Noise and cost of such assessments are likely to mean that T. albipennis ' decision-making mechanism is Pareto-optimal in one crucial regard; increasing the willingness of individuals to change their decisions cannot improve collective accuracy overall without impairing speed. We propose that a decentralized control algorithm based on this emigration behaviour may be derived for applications in engineering domains and specify the characteristics of the problems to which it should be suited, based on our new results.

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A systematic investigation of differences in perceptual decision-making as a function of the time and method of participant recruitment

10.31234/osf.io/w9d67 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Timothy Ballard ◽

Gina Fisher ◽

David K. Sewell

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Discrimination Task ◽

Standard Stimulus ◽

Brightness Discrimination ◽

Discrimination Performance ◽

Mechanical Turk ◽

Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽

Perceptual Decision Making ◽

Perceptual Decision ◽

Speed Accuracy

We examine the extent to which perceptual decision-making processes differ as a function of the time in the academic term in which the participant enrolls in the experiment and whether the participant is an undergraduate who completes the experiment for course credit, a paid participant who completes the experiment in the lab, or a paid participant recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk who completes the experiment online. In Study 1, we conducted a survey to examine cognitive psychologists' expectations regarding the quality of data obtained from these different groups of participants. We find that cognitive psychologists expect performance and response caution to be lowest among undergraduate participants who enroll at the end of the academic term, and highest among paid in-lab participants. Studies 2 and 3 tested these expectations using two common perceptual decision-making paradigms. Overall, we found little evidence for systematic time-of-term effects among undergraduate participants. The different participant groups responded to standard stimulus quality and speed/accuracy emphasis manipulations in similar ways. Among participants recruited via Mechanical Turk, the effect of speed/accuracy emphasis on response caution was strongest. This group also showed poorer discrimination performance than the other groups in a motion discrimination task, but not in a brightness discrimination task. We conclude that online crowdsourcing platforms can provide high quality perceptual decision-making data, but give recommendations for how data quality can be maximized when using these platforms for recruitment.

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