Abstract
Evidence accumulation has been the core component in recent development of perceptual and value-based decision-making theories. Most studies have focused on the evaluation of evidence between alternative options. What remains largely unknown is the process that prepares evidence: how may the decision-maker sample different sources of information sequentially, if they can only sample one source at a time? Here we propose a theoretical framework in prescribing how different sources of information should be sampled to facilitate the decision process: beliefs for different noisy sources are updated in a Bayesian manner and participants can proactively allocate resource for sampling (i.e., saccades) among different sources to maximize the information gain in such process. We show that our framework can account for human participants' actual choice and saccade behavior in a two-alternative value-based decision-making task. Moreover, our framework makes novel predictions about the empirical eye movement patterns.
Highlights
Value-based binary choice is a common and fundamental form of human decision making, from choosing between ham and turkey sandwiches for lunch to determining whether to have a family with a particular individual
The value estimate for each item is obtained from sampling the underlying option value distribution, and this is reflected in the final choice, consistent with previous literature that suggested choice predictions from attentional drift-diffusion model (aDDM) can be incorporated in the Bayesian framework (Cassey et al, 2013)
This is similar to the aDDM, where RDV was accumulated according to the difference between the values of two items
Summary
Value-based binary choice is a common and fundamental form of human decision making, from choosing between ham and turkey sandwiches for lunch to determining whether to have a family with a particular individual. Recent primate neurophysiology and human neuroimaging research has placed this accumulation process at the core for perceptual decision making It has Proactive Information Sampling in Value-Based Decision-Making been hypothesized that noisy evidence for each decision accumulates until certain threshold is reached and the corresponding decision is made (Ratcliff, 1978; Shadlen et al, 1996; Platt and Glimcher, 1999; Gold and Shadlen, 2002; Bogacz et al, 2006; Summerfield and Tsetsos, 2012; McGinty et al, 2016). We focus instead on the sampling assumption itself: What drives the switching of fixation between options in a two-alternative value-based choice task before the choice is made?
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