scholarly journals Breaking down hierarchies of decision-making in primates

eLife ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Hyafil ◽  
Rubén Moreno-Bote

Possible options in a decision often organize as a hierarchy of subdecisions. A recent study concluded that perceptual processes in primates mimic this hierarchical structure and perform subdecisions in parallel. We argue that a flat model that directly selects between final choices accounts more parsimoniously for the reported behavioral and neural data. Critically, a flat model is characterized by decision signals integrating evidence at different hierarchical levels, in agreement with neural recordings showing this integration in localized neural populations. Our results point to the role of experience for building integrated perceptual categories where sensory evidence is merged prior to decision.

2014 ◽  
pp. 1151-1165
Author(s):  
David McGuire ◽  
Nicola Patterson

Diversity training is an area of growing interest within organizations. As organizations and society become more culturally diverse, there is a need to provide training across all hierarchical levels to make individuals more aware of and sensitized to elements of difference. Managing and valuing diversity is becoming increasingly important to delivering higher levels of performance and creativity, enhancing problem solving and decision-making, and gaining cultural insights into domestic and overseas markets. As facilitators of diversity training, line managers are increasingly tasked with the important role of equipping employees with the skills and competencies to work effectively in diverse multicultural teams. Consequently, this chapter looks at the mechanics of how diversity is discussed and delivered in organizations. It explores the necessity of diversity training in safeguarding and respecting individual identity and in fostering more welcoming inclusive workplaces.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ren Paterson ◽  
Yizhou Lyu ◽  
Yuan Chang Leong

AbstractPeople are biased towards seeing outcomes that they are motivated to see. For example, sports fans of opposing teams often perceive the same ambiguous foul in favor of the team they support. Here, we test the hypothesis that amygdala-dependent allocation of visual attention facilitates motivational biases in perceptual decision-making. Human participants were rewarded for correctly categorizing an ambiguous image into one of two categories while undergoing fMRI. On each trial, we used a financial bonus to motivate participants to see one category over another. The reward maximizing strategy was to perform the categorization task accurately, but participants were biased towards categorizing the images as the category we motivated them to see. Heightened amygdala activity preceded motivation consistent categorizations, and participants with higher amygdala activation exhibited stronger motivational biases in their perceptual reports. Trial-by-trial amygdala activity was associated with stronger enhancement of neural activity encoding desirable percepts in sensory cortices, suggesting that amygdala-dependent effects on perceptual decisions arose from biased sensory processing. Analyses using a drift diffusion model provide converging evidence that trial-by-trial amygdala activity was associated with stronger motivational biases in the accumulation of sensory evidence. Prior work examining biases in perceptual decision-making have focused on the role of frontoparietal regions. Our work highlights an important contribution of the amygdala. When people are motivated to see one outcome over another, the amygdala biases perceptual decisions towards those outcomes.Significance StatementForming accurate perceptions of the environment is essential for adaptive behavior. People however are biased towards seeing what they want to see, giving rise to inaccurate perceptions and erroneous decisions. Here, we combined behavior, modeling, and fMRI to show that the bias towards seeing desirable percepts is related to trial-by-trial fluctuations in amygdala activity. In particular, during moments with higher amygdala activity, sensory processing is biased in favor of desirable percepts, such that participants are more likely to see what they want to see. These findings highlight the role of the amygdala in biasing visual perception, and shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying the influence of motivation and reward on how people decide what they see.


Author(s):  
David McGuire ◽  
Nicola Patterson

Diversity training is an area of growing interest within organizations. As organizations and society become more culturally diverse, there is a need to provide training across all hierarchical levels to make individuals more aware of and sensitized to elements of difference. Managing and valuing diversity is becoming increasingly important to delivering higher levels of performance and creativity, enhancing problem solving and decision-making, and gaining cultural insights into domestic and overseas markets. As facilitators of diversity training, line managers are increasingly tasked with the important role of equipping employees with the skills and competencies to work effectively in diverse multicultural teams. Consequently, this chapter looks at the mechanics of how diversity is discussed and delivered in organizations. It explores the necessity of diversity training in safeguarding and respecting individual identity and in fostering more welcoming inclusive workplaces.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaclyn Essig ◽  
Joshua B. Hunt ◽  
Gidon Felsen

AbstractDecision making is a cognitive process that mediates behaviors critical for survival. Choosing spatial targets is an experimentally-tractable form of decision making that depends on the midbrain superior colliculus (SC). While physiological and computational studies have uncovered the functional topographic organization of the SC, the role of specific SC cell types in spatial choice is unknown. Here, we leveraged behavior, optogenetics, neural recordings and modeling to directly examine the contribution of GABAergic SC neurons to the selection of opposing spatial targets. Although GABAergic SC neurons comprise a heterogeneous population with local and long-range projections, our results demonstrate that GABAergic SC neurons do not locally suppress premotor output, suggesting that functional long-range inhibition instead plays a dominant role in spatial choice. An attractor model requiring only intrinsic SC circuitry was sufficient to account for our experimental observations. Overall, our study elucidates the role of GABAergic SC neurons in spatial choice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Arceneaux

AbstractIntuitions guide decision-making, and looking to the evolutionary history of humans illuminates why some behavioral responses are more intuitive than others. Yet a place remains for cognitive processes to second-guess intuitive responses – that is, to be reflective – and individual differences abound in automatic, intuitive processing as well.


2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Pryce ◽  
Amanda Hall

Shared decision-making (SDM), a component of patient-centered care, is the process in which the clinician and patient both participate in decision-making about treatment; information is shared between the parties and both agree with the decision. Shared decision-making is appropriate for health care conditions in which there is more than one evidence-based treatment or management option that have different benefits and risks. The patient's involvement ensures that the decisions regarding treatment are sensitive to the patient's values and preferences. Audiologic rehabilitation requires substantial behavior changes on the part of patients and includes benefits to their communication as well as compromises and potential risks. This article identifies the importance of shared decision-making in audiologic rehabilitation and the changes required to implement it effectively.


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