Crossmodal estimation of decisions, guesses and delays in decision making: a collaboration between psychology, physiology and artificial intelligence

Our daily lives are full of decisions for which we could take an infinite time in order to decide as accurately as possible.

However, different speed and accuracy constraints, tied to the type of decisions, the decision-maker and his environment, are limiting the time allocated.

How decision-makers deal with this speed-accuracy tradeoff is an important cornerstone for the sciences studying decision making such as psychology, cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

One particularly successful proposal of formal decision-making models is to assume that decision-makers are reducing or increasing decision thresholds to adapt to the speed and accuracy constraints.

But recent evidence shows that this strategy is insufficient to explain the full range of behavioral and physiological data in decision tasks.

The present proposal suggests, based on new studies, that speed-accuracy tradeoff is achieved by varying the reliance on three different response strategies: guessing, immediate evidence accumulation and delayed evidence accumulation.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, involving experimental psychology, mathematical psychology along with cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence, the project aims at providing a broadly applicable framework to detect, measure, and estimate the reliance on the three strategies along with the description of the psychological processes behind these.

This project will train a promising cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist to apply advanced methods in a unique and fruitful research environment linking the four disciplines. It will also provide the host organisation with new tools to study latent cognitive processes in cognitive tasks.

Overall, the project will constitute an innovative approach to decision making with broad applicability, likely to increase the description and predictions we can make of behavior and psychological processes involved in decision making, in conjunction with inter-individual differences.