scholarly journals The effect of context on sensory accumulation involved in decision-making

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 23-24
Author(s):  
Léa Caya-Bissonnette
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Field Potential ◽  
Stimulus Presentation ◽  
Decision Processes ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Lateral Intraparietal Cortex ◽  
Underlying Processes ◽  
Do So

The underlying processes allowing for decision-making has been a question of interest for many neuroscientists. The lateral intraparietal cortex, or LIP, was shown to accumulate context and sensory information to compute a decision variable. The following review will present the work of Kumano, Suda and Uka who studied the link between context and sensory information during decision-making. To do so, a monkey was trained to associate the color of a fixating dot to one of two tasks. The tasks consisted in either indicating the motion or the depth of themajority of the dots on a screen. The local field potential of the LIP neurons was recorded, and the researchers found a role of context during the stimulus presentation in regards to decision formation. The results have important implication for mental disorders involving malfunction in decision processes.

The terroir of bureaucratic practice: Everyday life and scholarly method in the study of policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merje Kuus
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
Policy Practice ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to connect political geographic scholarship on institutions and policy more firmly to the experience of everyday life. Empirically, I foreground the ambiguous and indeterminate character of institutional decision-making and I underscore the need to closely consider the sensory texture of place and milieu in our analyses of it. My examples come from the study of diplomatic practice in Brussels, the capital of the European Union. Conceptually and methodologically, I use these examples to accentuate lived experience as an essential part of research, especially in the seemingly dry bureaucratic settings. I do so in particular through engaging with the work of Michel de Certeau, whose ideas enjoy considerable traction in cultural geography but are seldom used in political geography and policy studies. An accent on the texture and feel of policy practice necessarily highlights the role of place in that practice. This, in turn, may help us with communicating geographical research beyond our own discipline.

scholarly journals The causal role of the somatosensory cortex in prosocial behaviour

eLife ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selene Gallo ◽  
Riccardo Paracampo ◽  
Laura Müller-Pinzler ◽  
Mario Carlo Severo ◽  
Laila Blömer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Somatosensory Cortex ◽  
Pain Perception ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
High Definition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Hand Region ◽  
Do So

Witnessing another person’s suffering elicits vicarious brain activity in areas that are active when we ourselves are in pain. Whether this activity influences prosocial behavior remains the subject of debate. Here participants witnessed a confederate express pain through a reaction of the swatted hand or through a facial expression, and could decide to reduce that pain by donating money. Participants donate more money on trials in which the confederate expressed more pain. Electroencephalography shows that activity of the somatosensory cortex I (SI) hand region explains variance in donation. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) shows that altering this activity interferes with the pain–donation coupling only when pain is expressed by the hand. High-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) shows that altering SI activity also interferes with pain perception. These experiments show that vicarious somatosensory activations contribute to prosocial decision-making and suggest that they do so by helping to transform observed reactions of affected body-parts into accurate perceptions of pain that are necessary for decision-making.

scholarly journals Re-thinking the fixed-criterion model of perceptual decision-making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Laura Lee ◽  
Rachel N. Denison ◽  
Wei Ji Ma
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Feature Space ◽  
Decision Criterion ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
Response Variance ◽  
Sensory Uncertainty

Perceptual decision-making is often conceptualized as the process of comparing an internal decision variable to a categorical boundary, or criterion. How the mind sets such a criterion has been studied from at least two perspectives. First, researchers interested in consciousness have proposed that criterion-crossing determines whether a stimulus is consciously perceived. Second, researchers interested in decision-making have studied how the criterion depends on a range of stimulus and task variables. Both communities have considered the question of how the criterion behaves when sensory information is weak or uncertain. Interestingly, however, they have arrived at different conclusions. Consciousness researchers investigating a phenomenon called "subjective inflation" – a form of metacognitive mismatch in which observers overestimate the quality of their sensory representations in the periphery or at an unattended location – have proposed that the criterion governing subjective visibility is fixed. That is, it does not adjust to changes in sensory uncertainty. Decision-making researchers, on the other hand, have concluded that the criterion does adjust to account for sensory uncertainty, including under inattention. Here, we mathematically demonstrate that previous empirical findings supporting subjective inflation are consistent with either a fixed or a flexible decision criterion. We further show that specific experimental task requirements are necessary to make inferences about the flexibility of the criterion: 1) a clear mapping from decision variable space to stimulus feature space, and 2) a task incentive for observers to adjust their decision criterion as response variance increases. We conclude that the fixed-criterion model of subjective inflation requires re-thinking in light of new evidence from the probabilistic reasoning literature that decision criteria flexibly adjust according to response variance.

Deciding for Responsibility and Legitimation: Alternative Interpretations of Organizational Decision‐Making

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nils Brunsson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Decision Processes ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Organizational Decision Making ◽  
Empirical Validity ◽  
Organizational Action ◽  
National Governments

Recent studies have questioned the empirical validity of the equating of decision and choice and pointed at another role that organizational decisions sometimes play — the role of mobilizing organizational action, a role that requires less rationality than choice. But choice and mobilization are not the only roles of decision-making and decisions in organizations. This chapter argues that two additional roles exist — decisions may allocate responsibility and legitimacy to decision-makers and organizations. The chapter also considers how the different roles can explain the design of decision processes, the use of information and the number of decisions in organizations. The discussion is based on empirical studies of decision processes in such organizations: in local governments, national governments, and company boards. The eight decision processes studied concern city budgets, investments and disinvestments, and governmental programmes.

scholarly journals Words Faithful to the Phenomenon

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 160940691879779
Author(s):  
Luigina Mortari ◽  
Roberta Silva
Keyword(s):  
Intensive Care Unit ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Critical Care ◽  
Intensive Care ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Team Members ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Do So

The article presents the developing of a tool aimed to analyze the decision-making (DM) processes in critical care contexts. It was developed in a study conducted through a phenomenological approach. By analyzing the discursive practice through which physicians in an intensive care unit (ICU) arrive at decisions, we construct a discursive profile of each ICU involved, to improve the ICU team members’ knowledge of the complexity of their DM processes. To do so, we develop a system of analysis capable of capturing discursive actions faithfully. Our method facilitates a system of analysis that highlights the role of the various discursive acts in conversational flow, starting from the needs in an ICU setting, which are spontaneously recognized from the data, to the almost simultaneous processes of description and understanding. This has led to the creation of a tool follows the phenomenological-grounded route.

Shelter size influences self-assessment of size in crayfish, Orconectes rusticus: Consequences for agonistic fights

Behaviour ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 147 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Percival ◽  
Paul Moore
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
Orconectes Rusticus ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
Physical Size ◽  
Self Assessments ◽  
Agonistic Encounters

AbstractTheoretical models of animal assessment and decision strategies have assumed animals possess accurate information about themselves. The imperfect nature of self-assessment could cause animals to make inaccurate decisions during agonistic encounters. By manipulating sensory information used in self-assessment in crayfish, Orconectes rusticus, it may be possible to alter either decision-making paradigms or outcomes associated with agonistic encounters. We examined the role of self-assessment in the agonistic behaviour of crayfish by using differing shelter sizes to alter self-assessment of size. Similar-sized crayfish were kept in tanks with small, medium, and large shelters (relative to body size) and subsequently were fought against size-matched, naive opponents in novel chambers to remove resource value as a variable. Crayfish in small shelter treatments initiated and won more fights than crayfish in other shelters. Crayfish in the small shelter treatment had shorter durations of fight when compared to crayfish with the medium and large shelters. These results are consistent with the concept that crayfish placed in smaller shelters may be self-assessing their physical size and, thus, their fighting ability, higher than crayfish in larger shelters. Based on these results, current theoretical models need to include the role of inaccurate self-assessments in agonistic decision making paradigms.

Oscillatory Synchronization Requires Precise and Balanced Feedback Inhibition in a Model of the Insect Antennal Lobe

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (12) ◽  
pp. 2548-2570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique Martinez
Keyword(s):  
Antennal Lobe ◽  
Feedback Inhibition ◽  
Phase Locking ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Field Potential ◽  
Low Complexity ◽  
Projection Neurons ◽  
Synchronization Pattern ◽  
Oscillatory Cycle

In the insect olfactory system, odor-evoked transient synchronization of antennal lobe (AL) projection neurons (PNs) is phase-locked to the oscillations of the local field potential. Sensory information is contained in the spatiotemporal synchronization pattern formed by the identities of the phase-locked PNs. This article investigates the role of feedback inhibition from the local neurons (LNs) in this coding. First, experimental biological results are reproduced with a reduced computational spiking neural network model of the AL. Second, the low complexity of the model leads to a mathematical analysis from which a lower bound on the phase-locking probability is derived. Parameters involved in the bound indicate that PN phase locking depends not only on the number of LN-evoked inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) previously received, but also on their temporal jitter. If the inhibition received by a PN at the current oscillatory cycle is both perfectly balanced (i.e., equal to the mean inhibitory drive) and precise (without any jitter), then the PN will be phase-locked at the next oscillatory cycle with probability one.

Promotional Games Increase Consumer Conversion Rates and Spending

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan J Hock ◽  
Rajesh Bagchi ◽  
Thomas M Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
Affective Attitude ◽  
Conversion Rates ◽  
Prior Literature ◽  
Consumer Inferences ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Underlying Processes

Abstract Promotional games are used frequently in retail stores and online. While prior literature has focused on antecedents of promotional games, such as how individual differences induce game participation, little is known about post-winning decision making or its underlying processes. This study offers findings from seven studies to provide a detailed perspective on how promotional games increase consumer conversion rates and spending. The effect of winning a discount on conversion rates and spending is multiply determined and occurs via perceptions of luck and store affective attitude, and via perceptions of luck alone and store affective attitude alone. In order to get a more nuanced understanding of the underlying processes and to delineate theoretically driven boundary conditions for this novel effect, the authors subsequently analyze the two individual pathways through perceptions of luck and store affective attitude in isolation. Thereby, they contribute to the literature on pricing and promotions by providing a detailed understanding on how winning a promotional discount leads to a different set of consumer inferences relative to an equivalent straight discount, and to the literature on the role of luck in consumer behavior by providing a nuanced understanding of how luck operates in this common consumer context.

scholarly journals Mice can learn a stimulus-invariant orientation discrimination task

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry R Lyamzin ◽  
Ryo Aoki ◽  
Mohammad Abdolrahmani ◽  
Andrea Benucci
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Choice Model ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Orientation Discrimination ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Cognitive State ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Behavioral Strategies ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making

SummaryUnderstanding how the brain computes choice from sensory information is a central question of perceptual decision-making. Relevant behavioral tasks condition choice on abstract or invariant properties of the stimuli, thus decoupling stimulus-specific information from the decision variable. Among visual tasks, orientation discrimination is a gold standard; however, it is not clear if a mouse – a recently popular animal model in visual decision-making research – can learn an invariant orientation discrimination task and what choice strategies it would use.Here we show that mice can solve a discrimination task where choices are decoupled from the orientation of individual stimuli, depending instead on a measure of relative orientation. Mice learned this task, reaching an upper bound for discrimination acuity of 6 degrees and relying on decisionmaking strategies that balanced cognitive resources with history-dependent biases.We analyzed behavioral data from n=40 animals with the help of a novel probabilistic choice model that we used to interpret individual biases and behavioral strategies. The model explained variation in performance with task difficulty and identified unreported dimensions of variation associated with the circularity of the stimulus space. Furthermore, it showed a larger effect of history biases on animals’ choices during periods of lower engagement.Our results demonstrate that mice can learn invariant perceptual representations by combining decision-relevant stimulus information decoupled from low-level visual features, with the computation of the decision variable dependent on the cognitive state.

scholarly journals Evidence accumulation during perceptual decision-making is sensitive to the dynamics of attentional selection

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dragan Rangelov ◽  
Jason B. Mattingley
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Attentional Selection ◽  
Adaptive Behaviour ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
Sensory Inputs

AbstractThe ability to select and combine multiple sensory inputs in support of accurate decisions is a hallmark of adaptive behaviour. Attentional selection is often needed to prioritize stimuli that are task-relevant and to attenuate potentially distracting sources of sensory information. As most studies of perceptual decision-making to date have made use of task-relevant stimuli only, relatively little is known about how attention modulates decision making. To address this issue, we developed a novel ‘integrated’ decision-making task, in which participants judged the average direction of successive target motion signals while ignoring concurrent and spatially overlapping distractor motion signals. In two experiments that varied the role of attentional selection, we used linear regression to quantify the influence of target and distractor stimuli on behaviour. Using electroencephalography, we characterised the neural correlates of decision making, attentional selection and feature-specific responses to target and distractor signals. While targets strongly influenced perceptual decisions and associated neural activity, we also found that concurrent and spatially coincident distractors exerted a measurable bias on both behaviour and brain activity. Our findings suggest that attention operates as a real-time but imperfect filter during perceptual decision-making by dynamically modulating the contributions of task-relevant and irrelevant sensory inputs.

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