- Title
- Optimal or not; depends on the task
- Creator
- Evans, Nathan J.; Bennett, Aimée J.; Brown, Scott D.
- Relation
- ARC. DP180103613 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP180103613
- Relation
- Psychonomic Bulletin and Review Vol. 26, Issue 3, p. 1027-1034
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-018-1536-4
- Publisher
- Springer
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Decision-making involves a tradeoff between pressures for caution and urgency. Previous research has investigated how well humans optimize this tradeoff, and mostly concluded that people adopt a sub-optimal strategy that over-emphasizes caution. This emphasis reduces how many decisions can be made in a fixed time, which reduces the "reward rate". However, the strategy that is optimal depends critically on the timing properties of the experiment design: the slower the rate of decision opportunities, the more cautious the optimal strategy. Previous studies have almost uniformly adopted very fast designs, which favor very urgent decision-making. This raises the possibility that previous findings-that humans adopt strategies that are too cautious-could either be ascribed to human caution, or to the experiments' design. To test this, we used a slowed-down decision-making task in which the optimal strategy was quite cautious. With this task, and in contrast to previous findings, the average strategy adopted across participants was very close to optimal, with about equally many participants adopting too-cautious as too-urgent strategies. Our findings suggest that task design can play a role in inferences about optimality, and that previous conclusions regarding human sub-optimality are conditional on the task settings. This limits claims about human optimality that can be supported by the available evidence.
- Subject
- decision-making; reward rate; optimality; task demands; Bayes factors
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1450018
- Identifier
- uon:43805
- Identifier
- ISSN:1069-9384
- Rights
- This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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