Abstract
Many decisions result from the accumulation of decision-relevant information (evidence) over time. Even when maximizing decision accuracy requires weighting all the evidence equally, decision-makers often give stronger weight to evidence occurring early or late in the evidence stream. Here, we show changes in such temporal biases within participants as a function of intermittent judgments about parts of the evidence stream. Human participants performed a decision task that required a continuous estimation of the mean evidence at the end of the stream. The evidence was either perceptual (noisy random dot motion) or symbolic (variable sequences of numbers). Participants also reported a categorical judgment of the preceding evidence half-way through the stream in one condition or executed an evidence-independent motor response in another condition. The relative impact of early versus late evidence on the final estimation flipped between these two conditions. In particular, participants' sensitivity to late evidence after the intermittent judgment, but not the simple motor response, was decreased. Both the intermittent response as well as the final estimation reports were accompanied by nonluminance-mediated increases of pupil diameter. These pupil dilations were bigger during intermittent judgments than simple motor responses and bigger during estimation when the late evidence was consistent than inconsistent with the initial judgment. In sum, decisions activate pupil-linked arousal systems and alter the temporal weighting of decision evidence. Our results are consistent with the idea that categorical choices in the face of uncertainty induce a change in the state of the neural circuits underlying decision-making.NEW & NOTEWORTHY The psychology and neuroscience of decision-making have extensively studied the accumulation of decision-relevant information toward a categorical choice. Much fewer studies have assessed the impact of a choice on the processing of subsequent information. Here, we show that intermittent choices during a protracted stream of input reduce the sensitivity to subsequent decision information and transiently boost arousal. Choices might trigger a state change in the neural machinery for decision-making.
Highlights
Many decisions need to be made on the basis of noisy, incomplete, or ambiguous decision-relevant information
An extensive body of research on perceptual decisions under uncertainty has converged on the idea that evidence about the state of the sensory environment is continuously accumulated across time [1, 2]
The evidence weighting applied by human and nonhuman decision-makers often deviates from such flat weighting profiles
Summary
Many decisions need to be made on the basis of noisy, incomplete, or ambiguous decision-relevant information. Developed psychophysical protocols provide new tools for quantifying the effect of choices on the subsequent processing of decision evidence These tasks prompt two successive judgments within the same trial: a binary choice, followed by a continuous estimation [38,39,40,41,42,43] or a confidence judgment [44, 45]. We studied the relationship between the nonselective and selective changes in sensitivity following a choice and assessed their impact on temporal evidence weighting profiles. To this end, we reanalyzed the data sets from both these previous studies [38, 42]. For one of the data sets, we explored a relationship between these behavioral phenomena and pupil-linked, phasic arousal [35, 46,47,48,49]
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