Decisional Components Research Articles

Decisional components of motor responses are not related to online response control: Evidence from lexical decision and speed-accuracy tradeoff manipulations.

Evidence suggests that decision processes can propagate to motor-response execution. However, the functional characterization of motor decisional components is not yet fully understood. By combining a classic lexical decision experiment with manipulations of speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT), the present experiment assessed the hypothesis that decisional effects on chronometric measures of motor-response execution are related to online response control. The electromyographic (EMG) signal associated with manual button-press responses was used to dissociate the premotor component (from stimulus onset until the onset of the EMG activity) from the motor component (from EMG onset until the button-press), thus enabling the assessment of decision-related effects in terms of motor-response duration within single-trial reaction times. Other than replicating all the previously reported SAT effects, the experiment revealed hindered control processes when the instructions emphasized speed over accuracy, as indicated by measures of response control such as partial errors, fast errors, and correction likelihood. Nonetheless, the lexicality effect on motor responses, consisting of slower motor times for pseudowords compared to words, was impervious to any SAT modulation. The results suggest that SAT-induced variations in decision and response control policies may not be the prominent determinant of decision-related effects on motor times, highlighting the multiple "cognitive" components that affect peripheral response execution.

Education Professionals’ Cooperative Learning for the Development of Professional Capital

This article presents the research results on developing professional capital in Lithuanian schools during the national project “Time for leaders”. The longitudinal national initiative aimed to develop professional capital as the synergy of human, social and decisional components of schools through educational professionals’ various cooperation-based learning experiences. Using the descriptive case study approach, the article investigates the question of how the cooperative learning approach, applied in a long-term professional development project for education professionals, develop individuals’ professional capital. The paper provides an overview of project interventions (i.e., activities that stimulated cooperative learning of educational professionals) in the light of cooperative learning principles. The assessment of change over two project years in education professionals’ perceptions of professional capital, which is presented using Cohen’s d effect size measure. The measurement sample consisted of teachers (n(I) = 5105; n(II) = 4683) and school leaders (n(I) = 439; n(II) = 405) from 189 schools in 30 Lithuanian municipalities. The findings show a statistically significant medium positive change in professional capital. The most considerable change was estimated in the social and decisional capital dimensions and the relative smallest in the field of human capital.

Electrophysiological evidence of discontinuities in the propagation of lexical decision processes across the motor hierarchy

This research assessed the propagation of decisional effects across multiple electrophysiological indexes related to motor-response implementation within a lexical decision task, a paradigmatic case of a 2-alternative choice task on linguistic stimuli. By co-registering electroencephalographic and electromyographic data, we focused on the lexicality effect (i.e., the difference between responses to words and nonwords), and we tracked its influence across indexes of motor-response planning (indexed by effector-selective lateralization of beta-frequency desynchronizations), programming (indexed by the lateralized readiness potential) and execution (indexed by the chronometric durations of muscular responses). In addition, we explored corticomuscular coherence as the potential physiological underpinning of a continuous mapping of information between stimulus evaluation and response channels. The results revealed lexicality effects only on indexes of motor planning and execution, with no reliable involvement of the other measures. This pattern is discussed with reference to the hypothesis of multiple decisional components exerting different influences across the motor-hierarchy.

Redefining the decisional components of motor responses: Evidence from lexical and object decision tasks.

Models of decision making focusing on two-alternative choices have classically described motor-response execution as a nondecisional stage that serially follows the termination of decision processes. Recent evidence, however, points toward a more continuous transition between decision and motor processes. We investigated this transition in two lexical decisions and one object decision task. By recording the electromyographic (EMG) signal associated with the muscle responsible for the manual responses (i.e., button press), we partitioned single-trial reaction times into premotor (the time elapsing from stimulus onset until the onset of the EMG burst) and motor times (the time elapsing from the onset of the EMG burst and the button press), with the latter measuring response execution. Responses were slower for pseudowords and pseudo-objects compared to words and real objects. Importantly, these effects were reliable even at the level of motor time measures. Differently, despite the reliable effect at the level of reaction times and premotor times, there was no difference in motor times between high- and low-frequency words. Although these results, in line with recent evidence, challenge a purely noncognitive characterization of motor-response execution, they further suggest that motor times may selectively capture specific decisional components, which we identify with late-occurring verification and/or control mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Redefining the Decisional Components of Motor Responses: Evidence From Lexical and Object Decision Tasks

Supplemental Material for Redefining the Decisional Components of Motor Responses: Evidence From Lexical and Object Decision Tasks

Time Perception and Memory in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease: A Preliminary Study.

Episodic memory is a system that receives and stores information about temporally dated episodes and their interrelations. Our study aimed to investigate the relevance of episodic memory to time perception, with a specific focus on simultaneity/order judgment. Experiment 1 employed the simultaneity judgment task to discern differences in time perception between patients with mild cognitive impairment or dementia, and age-matched normals. A mathematical analysis capable of estimating subjects' time processing was utilized to identify the sensory and decisional components of temporal order and simultaneity judgment. Experiment 2 examined how differences in temporal perception relate to performance in temporal order memory, in which time delays play a critical role. The temporal decision windows for both temporal order and simultaneity judgments exhibited marginal differences between patients with episodic memory impairment, and their healthy counterparts (p = 0.15, t(22) = 1.34). These temporal decision windows may be linked to the temporal separation of events in episodic memory (Pearson's ρ = -0.53, p = 0.05). Based on our findings, the frequency of visual events accumulated and encoded in the working memory system in the patients' and normal group appears to be approximately (5.7 and 11.2) Hz, respectively. According to the internal clock model, a lower frequency of event pulses tends to result in underestimation of event duration, which phenomenon might be linked to the observed time distortions in patients with dementia.

Breast Tissue Density Influences Tumor Malignancy Perception and Decisions in Mammography

High density breast tissue has been found to reduce radiologists’ accuracy in detecting and classifying mammogram abnormalities. The current research examines the perceptual and decisional components that underlie diagnostic classification (independent of detection) in a sample of novices. Mammograms were varied along two dimensions: Breast tissue density (low/high) and the nature of an identified mass (benign/malignant). In two experiments, participants learned to classify images into 4 categories created by factorial combination of these dimensions. In low density tissue, accuracy was higher for benign than for malignant masses. Surprisingly, and in contrast to the mammography literature, accuracy for malignant masses was higher in high-density than in low-density tissue. Cognitive modeling based in general recognition theory (GRT) indicated that low-density/benign category accuracy was largely due to high perceptual discriminability for that category. The high accuracy level for malignant masses in high density tissue was accounted for by decision bound slopes that favored the “malignant” response for items in the high-density malignant category. Because GRT can provide insight into perceptual and decisional determinants of observed classification accuracy, as well as individual-difference level parameters about attention allocation, GRT may be a means to obtain a more detailed understanding of diagnostic classification of complex naturalistic stimuli.

Stereotypical Processing of Emotional Faces: Perceptual and Decisional Components.

People tend to associate anger with male faces and happiness or surprise with female faces. This angry-men-happy-women bias has been ascribed to either top-down (e.g., well-learned stereotypes) or bottom-up (e.g., shared morphological cues) processes. The dissociation between these two theoretical alternatives has proved challenging. The current effort addresses this challenge by harnessing two complementary metatheoretical approaches to dimensional interaction: Garner's logic of inferring informational structure and General Recognition Theory—a multidimensional extension of signal detection theory. Conjoint application of these two rigorous methodologies afforded us to: (a) uncover the internal representations that generate the angry-men-happy-women phenomenon, (b) disentangle varieties of perceptual (bottom-up) and decisional (top-down) sources of interaction, and (c) relate operational and theoretical meanings of dimensional independence. The results show that the dimensional interaction between emotion and gender is generated by varieties of perceptual and decisional biases. These outcomes document the involvement of both bottom-up (e.g., shared morphological structures) and top-down (stereotypes) factors in social perception.

Interval timing deficits and their neurobiological correlates in aging mice

Age-related neurobiological and cognitive alterations suggest that interval timing (as a related function) is also altered in aging, which can, in turn, disrupt timing-dependent functions. We investigated alterations in interval timing with aging and accompanying neurobiological changes. We tested 4–6, 10–12, and 18–20 month-old mice on the dual peak interval procedure. Results revealed a specific deficit in the termination of timed responses (stop-times). The decision processes contributed more to timing variability (vs. clock/memory process) in the aged mice. We observed age-dependent reductions in the number of dopaminergic neurons in the VTA and SNc, cholinergic neurons in the medial septum/diagonal band (MS/DB) complex, and density of dopaminergic axon terminals in the DLS/DMS. Negative correlations were found between the number of dopaminergic neurons in the VTA and stop times, and the number of cholinergic neurons in MS/DB complex and the acquisition of stop times. Our results point at age-dependent changes in the decisional components of interval timing and the role of dopaminergic and cholinergic functions in these behavioral alterations.

Sensory and decisional components of endogenous attention are dissociable.

Endogenous cueing of attention enhances sensory processing of the attended stimulus (perceptual sensitivity) and prioritizes information from the attended location for guiding behavioral decisions (spatial choice bias). Here, we test whether sensitivity and bias effects of endogenous spatial attention are under the control of common or distinct mechanisms. Human observers performed a multialternative visuospatial attention task with probabilistic spatial cues. Observers’ behavioral choices were analyzed with a recently developed multidimensional signal detection model (the m-ADC model). The model effectively decoupled the effects of spatial cueing on sensitivity from those on spatial bias and revealed striking dissociations between them. Sensitivity was highest at the cued location and not significantly different among uncued locations, suggesting a spotlight-like allocation of sensory resources at the cued location. On the other hand, bias varied systematically with cue validity, suggesting a graded allocation of decisional priority across locations. Cueing-induced modulations of sensitivity and bias were uncorrelated within and across subjects. Bias, but not sensitivity, correlated with key metrics of prioritized decision-making, including reaction times and decision optimality indices. In addition, we developed a novel metric, differential risk curvature, for distinguishing bias effects of attention from those of signal expectation. Differential risk curvature correlated selectively with m-ADC model estimates of bias but not with estimates of sensitivity. Our results reveal dissociable effects of endogenous attention on perceptual sensitivity and choice bias in a multialternative choice task and motivate the search for the distinct neural correlates of each.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Attention is often studied as a unitary phenomenon. Yet, attention can both enhance the perception of important stimuli (sensitivity) and prioritize such stimuli for decision-making (bias). Employing a multialternative spatial attention task with probabilistic cueing, we show that attention affects sensitivity and bias through dissociable mechanisms. Specifically, the effects on sensitivity alone match the notion of an attentional “spotlight.” Our behavioral model enables quantifying component processes of attention, and identifying their respective neural correlates.

Anhedonia following mild traumatic brain injury in rats: A behavioral economic analysis of positive and negative reinforcement

Psychiatric disorders affect nearly 50% of individuals who have experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Anhedonia is a major symptom of numerous psychiatric disorders and is a diagnostic criterion for depression. It has recently been appreciated that reinforcement may be separated into consummatory (hedonic), motivational and decisional components, all of which may be affected differently in disease. Although anhedonia is typically assessed using positive reinforcement, the importance of stress in psychopathology suggests the study of negative reinforcement (removal or avoidance of aversive events) may be equally important. The present study investigated positive and negative reinforcement following a rat model of mild TBI (mTBI) using lateral fluid percussion. Hedonic value and motivation for reinforcement was determined by behavioral economic analyses. Following mTBI, the hedonic value of avoiding foot shock was reduced. In contrast, the hedonic value of escaping foot shock or obtaining a sucrose pellet was not altered by mTBI. Moreover, motivation to avoid or escape foot shock or to acquire sucrose was not altered by mTBI. Our results suggest that individuals experiencing mTBI find avoidance of aversive events less reinforcing, and therefore are less apt to utilize proactive control of stress.

The Indecision Model of Psychophysical Performance in Dual-Presentation Tasks: Parameter Estimation and Comparative Analysis of Response Formats.

Psychophysical data from dual-presentation tasks are often collected with the two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) response format, asking observers to guess when uncertain. For an analytical description of performance, psychometric functions are then fitted to data aggregated across the two orders/positions in which stimuli were presented. Yet, order effects make aggregated data uninterpretable, and the bias with which observers guess when uncertain precludes separating sensory from decisional components of performance. A ternary response format in which observers are also allowed to report indecision should fix these problems, but a comparative analysis with the 2AFC format has never been conducted. In addition, fitting ternary data separated by presentation order poses serious challenges. To address these issues, we extended the indecision model of psychophysical performance to accommodate the ternary, 2AFC, and same–different response formats in detection and discrimination tasks. Relevant issues for parameter estimation are also discussed along with simulation results that document the superiority of the ternary format. These advantages are demonstrated by fitting the indecision model to published detection and discrimination data collected with the ternary, 2AFC, or same–different formats, which had been analyzed differently in the sources. These examples also show that 2AFC data are unsuitable for testing certain types of hypotheses. matlab and R routines written for our purposes are available as Supplementary Material, which should help spread the use of the ternary format for dependable collection and interpretation of psychophysical data.

Decomposing encoding and decisional components in visual-word recognition: a diffusion model analysis.

In a diffusion model, performance as measured by latency and accuracy in two-choice tasks is decomposed into different parameters that can be linked to underlying cognitive processes. Although the diffusion model has been utilized to account for lexical decision data, the effects of stimulus manipulations in previous experiments originated from just one parameter: the quality of the evidence. Here we examined whether the diffusion model can be used to effectively decompose the underlying processes during visual-word recognition. We explore this issue in an experiment that features a lexical manipulation (word frequency) that we expected to affect mostly the quality of the evidence (the drift rate parameter), and a perceptual manipulation (stimulus orientation) that presumably affects the nondecisional time (the Ter parameter, time of encoding and response) more than it affects the drift rate. Results showed that although the manipulations do not affect only one parameter, word frequency and stimulus orientation had differential effects on the model's parameters. Thus, the diffusion model is a useful tool to decompose the effects of stimulus manipulations in visual-word recognition.

Perceived difficulty and appropriateness of decision making by General Practitioners: a systematic review of scenario studies.

BackgroundHealth-care quality in primary care depends largely on the appropriateness of General Practitioners’ (GPs; Primary Care or Family Physicians) decisions, which may be influenced by how difficult they perceive decisions to be. Patient scenarios (clinical or case vignettes) are widely used to investigate GPs’ decision making. This review aimed to identify the extent to which perceived decision difficulty, decision appropriateness, and their relationship have been assessed in scenario studies of GPs’ decision making; identify possible determinants of difficulty and appropriateness; and investigate the relationship between difficulty and appropriateness.MethodsMEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, the Cochrane Library and Web of Science were searched for scenario studies of GPs’ decision making. One author completed article screening. Ten percent of titles and abstracts were checked by an independent volunteer, resulting in 91% agreement. Data on decision difficulty and appropriateness were extracted by one author and descriptively synthesised. Chi-squared tests were used to explore associations between decision appropriateness, decision type and decision appropriateness assessment method.ResultsOf 152 included studies, 66 assessed decision appropriateness and five assessed perceived difficulty. While no studies assessed the relationship between perceived difficulty and appropriateness, one study objectively varied the difficulty of the scenarios and assessed the relationship between a measure of objective difficulty and appropriateness. Across 38 studies where calculations were possible, 62% of the decisions were appropriate as defined by the appropriateness standard used. Chi-squared tests identified statistically significant associations between decision appropriateness, decision type and decision appropriateness assessment method. Findings suggested a negative relationship between decision difficulty and appropriateness, while interventions may have the potential to reduce perceived difficulty.ConclusionsScenario-based research into GPs’ decisions rarely considers the relationship between perceived decision difficulty and decision appropriateness. The links between these decisional components require further investigation.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-014-0621-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The Impacts of Inversion and Thatcherisation on Face Processing: Mapping between ERP and GRT

Prior work on the Thatcher illusion (Cornes et al., 2011; Mestry et al., 2012) has indicated both perceptual and decisional components of the illusion. We provide evidence of neural correlates associated with independent influences of inversion and level of feature manipulation (Thatcherisation) in the Thatcher illusion. We also provide an account of how ERP results can be interpreted within the configural processing framework defined by general recognition theory (GRT). We conducted a study examining inversion and the level of Thatcherisation (typical face, eyes Thatcherised, mouth Thatcherised, or both features Thatcherised) on a set of event-related components (the P1, N170, P2 and P3b) that have previously been considered in relation to the Thatcher illusion. Results reveal three independent effects: (1) inversion effects leading to increased amplitude for inverted faces at the N170 and P2 in the occipito-parietal area; (2) a reduction in N170 amplitude with level of Thatcherisation in the right hemisphere; and (3) inversion effects leading to increased amplitude for inverted faces at P3b in the centro-parietal area. This study reveals effects of Thatcherisation that are independent from effects of inversion in the ERP data. These effects can also be mapped to perceptual and decisional measures of configurality revealed in behavioural data using GRT (Mestry et al., 2012). We suggest the Thatcherisation effect at N170 may relate to violations of perceptual independence, the inversion effect across N170 and P2 may relate to violations of perceptual separability, and the inversion effect at P3b may relate to violations of decisional separability. Thus, we suggest a possible role for ERP data in providing a source of converging evidence for inferences regarding the role of perceptual and decisional factors in configurality.

On the discrepant results in synchrony judgment and temporal-order judgment tasks: a quantitative model

Research on the perception of temporal order uses either temporal-order judgment (TOJ) tasks or synchrony judgment (SJ) tasks, in both of which two stimuli are presented with some temporal delay and observers must judge the order of presentation. Results generally differ across tasks, raising concerns about whether they measure the same processes. We present a model including sensory and decisional parameters that places these tasks in a common framework that allows studying their implications on observed performance. TOJ tasks imply specific decisional components that explain the discrepancy of results obtained with TOJ and SJ tasks. The model is also tested against published data on audiovisual temporal-order judgments, and the fit is satisfactory, although model parameters are more accurately estimated with SJ tasks. Measures of latent point of subjective simultaneity and latent sensitivity are defined that are invariant across tasks by isolating the sensory parameters governing observed performance, whereas decisional parameters vary across tasks and account for observed differences across them. Our analyses concur with other evidence advising against the use of TOJ tasks in research on perception of temporal order.

Recalibration of the auditory continuity illusion: Sensory and decisional effects

An interrupted sound can be perceived as continuous when noise masks the interruption, creating an illusion of continuity. Recent findings have shown that adaptor sounds preceding an ambiguous target sound can influence listeners’ rating of target continuity. However, it remains unclear whether these aftereffects on perceived continuity influence sensory processes, decisional processes ( i.e., criterion shifts), or both. The present study addressed this question. Results show that the target sound was more likely to be rated as ‘continuous’ when preceded by adaptors that were perceived as clearly discontinuous than when it was preceded by adaptors that were heard (illusorily or veridically) as continuous. Detection-theory analyses indicated that these contrastive aftereffects reflect a combination of sensory and decisional processes. The contrastive sensory aftereffect persisted even when adaptors and targets were presented to opposite ears, suggesting a neural origin in structures that receive binaural inputs. Finally, physically identical but perceptually ambiguous adaptors that were rated as ‘continuous’ induced more reports of target continuity than adaptors that were rated as ‘discontinuous’. This assimilative aftereffect was purely decisional. These findings confirm that judgments of auditory continuity can be influenced by preceding events, and reveal that these aftereffects have both sensory and decisional components.

Electrophysiological correlates of the composite face illusion: Disentangling perceptual and decisional components of holistic face processing in the human brain

When the bottom halves of two faces differ, people’s behavioral judgment of the identical top halves of those faces is impaired: they report that the top halves are different, and/or take more time than usual to provide a response. This behavioral measure is known as the composite face effect (CFE) and has traditionally been taken as evidence that faces are perceived holistically. Recently, however, it has been claimed that this effect is driven almost entirely by decisional, rather than perceptual, factors ( Richler, Gauthier, Wenger, & Palmeri, 2008). To disentangle the contribution of perceptual and decisional brain processes, we aimed to obtain an event-related potential (ERP) measure of the CFE at a stage of face encoding ( Jacques & Rossion, 2009) in the absence of a behavioral CFE effect. Sixteen participants performed a go/no-go task in an oddball paradigm, lifting a finger of their right or left hand when the top half of a face changed identity. This change of identity of the top of the face was associated with an increased ERP signal on occipito-temporal electrode sites at the N170 face-sensitive component (∼160 ms), the later decisional P3b component, and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) starting at ∼350 ms. The N170 effect was observed equally early when only the unattended bottom part of the face changed, indicating that an identity change was perceived across the whole face in this condition. Importantly, there was no behavioral response bias for the bottom change trials, and no evidence of decisional biases from electrophysiological data (no P3b and LRP deflection in no-go trials). These data show that an early CFE can be measured in ERPs in the absence of any decisional response bias, indicating that the CFE reflects primarily the visual perception of the whole face.

Iterative Design of Advanced Mobile Robots

Integration of hardware, software and decisional components is fundamental in the design of advanced mobile robotic systems capable of performing challenging tasks in unstructured and unpredictable environments. We address such integration challenges following an iterative design strategy, centered on a decisional architecture based on the notion of motivated selection of behavior-producing modules. This architecture evolved over the years from the integration of obstacle avoidance, message reading and touch screen graphical interfaces, to localization and mapping, planning and scheduling, sound source localization, tracking and separation, speech recognition and generation on a custom-made interactive robot. Designed to be a scientific robot reporter, the robot provides understandable and configurable interaction, intention and information in a conference setting, reporting its experiences for on-line and off-line analysis. This paper presents the integration of these capabilities on this robot, revealing interesting new issues in terms of planning and scheduling, coordination of audio/visual/graphical capabilities, and monitoring the uses and impacts of the robot's decisional capabilities in unconstrained operating conditions. This paper also outlines new design requirements for our next design iteration, adding compliance to the locomotion and manipulation capabilities of the platform, and natural interaction through gestures using arms, facial expressions and the robot's pose.

Holistic processing of faces: Perceptual and decisional components.

Researchers have used several composite face paradigms to assess holistic processing of faces. In the selective attention paradigm, participants decide whether one face part (e.g., top) is the same as a previously seen face part. Their judgment is affected by whether the irrelevant part of the test face is the same as or different than the relevant part of the study face. This failure of selective attention implies holistic processing. However, the authors show that this task alone cannot distinguish between perceptual and decisional sources of holism. The distinction can be addressed by the complete identification paradigm, in which both face parts are judged to be same or different, combined with analyses based on general recognition theory (F. G. Ashby & J. T. Townsend, 1986). The authors used a different paradigm, sequential responses, to relate these 2 paradigms empirically and theoretically. Sequential responses produced the same results as did selective attention and complete identification. Moreover, disruptions of holistic processing by systematic misalignment of the faces corresponded with systematic and significant changes in the decisional components, but not in the perceptual components, that were extracted using general recognition theory measures. This finding suggests a significant decisional component of holistic face processing in the composite face task.