Changing your mind: a computational mechanism of vacillation

By Arbora Resulaj, Roozbeh Kiani, D. M. Wolpert, Michael N. Shadlen. Nature, 2009

494 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A decision is a commitment to a proposition or plan of action based on evidence and the expected costs and benefits associated with the outcome. Progress in a variety of fields has led to a quantitative understanding of the mechanisms that evaluate evidence and reach a decision. Several formalisms propose that a representation of noisy evidence is evaluated against a criterion to produce a decision. Without additional evidence, however, these formalisms fail to explain why a decision-maker would change their mind. Here we extend a model, developed to account for both the timing and the accuracy of the initial decision, to explain subsequent changes of mind. Subjects made decisions about a noisy visual stimulus, which they indicated by moving a handle. Although they received no additional information after initiating their movement, their hand trajectories betrayed a change of mind in some trials. We propose that noisy evidence is accumulated over time until it reaches a criterion level, or bound, which determines the initial decision, and that the brain exploits information that is in the processing pipeline when the initial decision is made to subsequently either reverse or reaffirm the initial decision. The model explains both the frequency of changes of mind as well as their dependence on both task difficulty and whether the initial decision was accurate or erroneous. The theoretical and experimental findings advance the understanding of decision-making to the highly flexible and cognitive acts of vacillation and self-correction.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bbf5e577d57100b6c29bd1a8312bc7d6683f0c9

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Nonequilibrium physics in biology (2019, methodology): “The emergence of a new attractor with increasing input strength has been observed experimentally (Resulaj et al., 2009).”
Self-Evaluation of Decision-Making: A General Bayesian Framework for Metacognitive Computation (2017, methodology): “…by continued processing of predecision evidence in time (Baranski & Petrusic, 1998; Mo-ran, Teodorescu, & Usher, 2015; Rabbitt & Vyas, 1981; Resulaj, Kiani, Wolpert, & Shadlen, 2009; S. Yu, Pleskac, & Zeigenfuse, 2015) or the receipt of new postdecision evidence (Bronfman et al., 2015;…”
Neural mechanisms for interacting with a world full of action choices. (2010, methodology): “Following Goodale & Milner (1992, Milner & Goodale 1995), one can interpret the dorsal visual stream as part of the system for specifying the parameters of potential actions using visual information, a process that continues during movement execution (Resulaj et al. 2009).”
Post-decisional accounts of biases in confidence (2016, background): “These ‘changes of mind’ were observed both in simple perceptual decisions [12], and in a recognition memory task [14], and cannot be explained by models that disregard post-decisional processing.”
Motor Control is Decision-Making (2012, background): “If this bound is subsequently crossed then the decision is reversed, leading to a change of mind and an appropriately altered movement trajectory [38 ].”