Decision making
How Do We Change Our Mind-Style to Make Faster Decisions?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People lower their decision standards as time passes within a choice, especially when they know some decisions might be impossibly difficult.
Key findings
The researchers found that participants significantly decreased their decision boundaries over time during mixed-difficulty trials, meaning they lowered their standards as a trial dragged on. Even in easy games where keeping a constant boundary was mathematically optimal, participants still lowered their standards over time. However, this non-optimal behavior was highly sensible because the reward landscape was forgiving, meaning they lost very little potential reward by choosing to decide quickly rather than waiting.
Methodology
The researchers ran experiments to see if people lower their decision thresholds over time. In one phase, twenty-four participants completed six games where they had to guess whether a moving character would jump up or down based on noisy visual cues. These games featured three types of games (easy, difficult, or mixed), and participants were rewarded for correct choices but had a limited total time to play, creating a speed-accuracy tradeoff. In another phase, the researchers used a faster evidence-foraging task across four experiments to test how changing presentation speeds and delay times affected the decision boundaries.
Limitations
This study has several limitations. First, the experiments relied on a small sample of twenty-four participants, which may not represent the broader population. Second, the direct tracking of decision boundaries was done using an explicit sampling paradigm, and it remains unclear if these results apply to rapid, automatic perceptual decisions where information is processed implicitly. Finally, the researchers noted that individual differences in nondecision time (the time to physically press a button) varied, introducing potential measurement error into the mathematical estimates of the decision boundaries.
How this study connects
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