Topic: decision threshold

Human decisions are often made in a social context, thereby relying on the ability to anticipate and predict others’ behavior. In such contexts, gaze is an important communicative signal which can inform individuals about others’ intentions, goals and upcoming decisions. Gaze has been shown to affect various cognitive processes and states in human interactions. Nevertheless, the effect of gaze on social decision-making is still understudied. Here, we investigated the effect of mutual gaze exhibited by a humanoid agent in an interactive setup. Participants (N=40) played a strategic game against

In the study of decision making, neuroscientists have largely focused on how the brain accumulates evidence during the formation of decisions. Less is known about how the accumulation of evidence is terminated. When decisions are communicated with an eye movement, neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) represent the accumulation of evidence. It has long been hypothesized that downstream areas terminate the decision process when LIP reaches a threshold level of activity. We recorded from neurons in the superior colliculus (SC), a primary downstream target of LIP, as a monkey performed

Decisions are often biased by implicit or explicit preferences for one response alternative over another. Recent work suggests that such decision biases are influenced by task-evoked (phasic) increases in neuromodulation, as measured by pupil size, in line with theories proposing that neuromodulatory systems may regulate the balance between bottom-up and top-down processes. Although intriguing, there is scarce causal evidence tying neuromodulator activity to decision biases. Here, we manipulated decision bias through non-monetary punishments to specific errors (false alarms or misses) while up