The hare and the tortoise: emphasizing speed can change the evidence used to make decisions.

@article{Rae2014TheHA,
  title={The hare and the tortoise: emphasizing speed can change the evidence used to make decisions.},
  author={Babette Rae and Andrew Heathcote and Chris Donkin and Lee Averell and Scott D. Brown},
  journal={Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition},
  year={2014},
  volume={40 5},
  pages={
          1226-43
        }
}
Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the quantity of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating new models of decision making, but the explanation itself has not been carefully tested against data. We rigorously test the assumption that emphasizing decision speed… 
View on PubMed
newcl.org
159 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
10
Background Citations
37
Methods Citations
22
Results Citations
14

159 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

The role of passing time in decision-making.
TLDR
The results suggest that collapsing thresholds models of decision-making are inconsistent with human behaviour even in some situations where there are normative motivations for these models.
Caution in decision-making under time pressure is mediated by timing ability
Modeling the Effect of Speed Emphasis in Probabilistic Category Learning
For many decisions in life, there is uncertainty about the outcome even if the stimulus is a familiar one. Under these circumstances, people often rely upon previous experience to make a choice. In…
Vision for the blind: visual psychophysics and blinded inference for decision models
TLDR
It is argued that the R DM task has unusual perceptual characteristics that may be better described by a model in which drift and diffusion rates increase over time rather than turn on abruptly, and that the continuous-onset model provides a better overall fit and more meaningful parameter estimates, which accord with the known psychophysical properties of the RDM task.
Assessing the speed--accuracy trade-off effect on the capacity of information processing.
TLDR
This is the first analysis of the SAT in multiple signal processing, using recently developed technologies for measuring capacity that take into account both response time and choice probability, and finds that participants strategically ignored redundant information when they were forced to respond quickly, but only when the additional stimulus was reliably redundant.
Racing against the clock: Evidence-based versus time-based decisions.
TLDR
This work proposes that decision processes are composed of 2 diffusive accumulation mechanisms-1 evidence-based and 1 time-based-that compete in an independent race architecture and shows that this timed racing diffusion model (TRDM) provides a unified, comprehensive, and quantitatively accurate explanation of key decision phenomena.
Trading accuracy for speed over the course of a decision
TLDR
It is shown that humans can voluntarily change their SAT on even shorter timescales – i.e., over the course of a decision – and dynamic changes in accuracy criterion allow the regulation of the SAT within the timescale of a single decision.
Decision processes and the slowing of simple choices in schizophrenia.
TLDR
The schizophrenia group displayed strong sequential effects that were captured by the response on the previous trial affecting the relative amount of evidence required for choice in the LBA, illustrating that evidence accumulation models provide a sensitive tool that can be used to identify the cognitive mechanisms causing slowing in schizophrenia.
Double responding: A new constraint for models of speeded decision making
Time pressure affects the efficiency of perceptual processing in decisions under conflict
TLDR
The results show that the relation between speed and accuracy not only relies on the strategic adjustment of response boundaries but involves variations of processing efficiency, which supports recent evidence of drift rate modulations in response to time pressure in simple perceptual decisions and confirms their validity in the context of more complex tasks.
...
1
2
3
4
5
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 76 REFERENCES
Decision-making with multiple alternatives
TLDR
This work measured behavioral and physiological responses of monkeys on a two- and four-choice direction-discrimination decision task and observed a time-dependent rise in firing rates that may impose a deadline for deciding.
Interpreting the parameters of the diffusion model: An empirical validation
TLDR
The diffusion model allows for the statistical separation of different components of a speeded binary decision process (decision threshold, bias, information uptake, and motor response) and it was found that decision thresholds were higher when the authors induced accuracy motivation, and drift rates were lower when stimuli were harder to discriminate.
Context Effects in Multi-Alternative Decision Making: Empirical Data and a Bayesian Model
TLDR
It is shown that a previously dismissed optimal observer model might provide a parsimonious account of both response time and error rate data, and this model suggests that people approximate Bayesian inference in multi-alternative choice, except for some perceptual limitations.
Diffusion versus linear ballistic accumulation: different models but the same conclusions about psychological processes?
TLDR
It is concluded that inferences about psychological processes made from real data are unlikely to depend on the model that is used, and that real manipulations of caution map closely, but not perfectly to response caution in either model.
The Optimality of Sensory Processing during the Speed–Accuracy Tradeoff
TLDR
The findings suggest that, in addition to lowered response thresholds, the performance decrements observed during speeded decision making may result from a failure to optimally process sensory signals.
A Diffusion Model Account of Criterion Shifts in the Lexical Decision Task.
Striatum and pre-SMA facilitate decision-making under time pressure
TLDR
Functional neuroimaging showed that cueing for speed activates the striatum and the pre-supplementary motor area, brain structures that are part of a closed-loop motor circuit involved in the preparation of voluntary action plans.
A Bayesian approach to diffusion process models of decision-making
TLDR
This paper uses the Wiener diffusion model as an example of the Bayesian possibilities by applying the Ratcliff diffusion model to a benchmark data set involving a brightness discrimination task, and uses a categorical covariate and nonlinear regression to model the psychophysical function in a theoretically satisfying way.
The effects of aging on the speed-accuracy compromise: Boundary optimality in the diffusion model.
TLDR
The results suggest that young adults attempt to balance speed and accuracy to achieve the most correct answers per unit time, whereas older adultts attempt to minimize errors even if they must respond quite slowly to do so.
The dynamics of cognition and action: mental processes inferred from speed-accuracy decomposition.
TLDR
Estimates of the amount of partial information that subjects have accumulated about a test stimulus at each intermediate moment during a reaction time trial provide deeper insights into the rate at which partial information is accumulated over time and into discrete versus continuous modes of information processing.
...
1
2
3
4
5
...