Quantifying decision-making in dynamic, continuously evolving environments

Abstract

During perceptual decision-making tasks, centroparietal EEG potentials report an evidence accumulation-to-bound process that is time locked to trial onset. However, decisions in real-world environments are rarely confined to discrete trials; they instead unfold continuously, with accumulation of time-varying evidence being recency-weighted towards its immediate past. Confronted with time-varying stimuli, humans can appropriately adapt their weighting of recent evidence according to the statistics of the environment. The neural mechanisms supporting this adaptation currently remain unclear. Here, we show that humans' ability to adapt evidence weighting to different sensory environments is reflected in changes in centroparietal EEG potentials. We use a novel continuous task design to show that the Centroparietal Positivity (CPP) becomes more sensitive to fluctuations in sensory evidence when large shifts in evidence are less frequent, and is primarily sensitive to fluctuations in decision-relevant (not decision-irrelevant) sensory input. A complementary triphasic component over parietal cortex encodes the sum of recently accumulated sensory evidence, and its magnitude covaries with the duration over which different individuals integrate sensory evidence. Our findings reveal how adaptations in centroparietal responses reflect flexibility in evidence accumulation to the statistics of dynamic sensory environments.

The interplay of uncertainty, relevance and learning influences auditory categorization

“…A longstanding trend in sensory psychophysics has been to investigate and report average human behavior leaving inter-participant variability, except for that in sensory uncertainty and auditory thresholds, relatively underexplored 55,59,60 . Here, using different possible decision-making models we characterized how individual participants may vary in their categorization behaviors.…”

Stepping Towards Sustainable Leadership: Analysis of Leadership Practices In The Mining Industry In Supporting The Achievement of Sustainable Development Goals

“…In sustainable leadership practices, leaders play a role in facilitating continuous organizational learning, including continuous improvement in sustainable practices. Theory of Sustainable Decision Making (Bum et al, 2021;Ruesseler et al, 2023;Zhu et al, 2021) This theory emphasizes the importance of decision-making that considers aspects of sustainability. In sustainable leadership practice, leaders use this theory to guide decisionmaking that minimizes environmental and social impacts.…”

The neural correlates of continuous feedback processing

“…Our goal here was to build on previous animal work (Kim et al, 2020 ; Wang et al, 2021 ) by identifying and testing a neural signature of continuous feedback processing in humans. In particular, we sought to capitalize upon recent developments in EEG analysis that use a regression‐based approach to unmix components for continuously varying task variables from other discrete events (Crosse et al, 2016 ; Ehinger & Dimigen, 2019 ; Hassall et al, 2022 ; Ruesseler et al, 2022 ). We predicted that the resulting signal would resemble the SPN, an ERP component previously linked to reward anticipation and tonic dopamine (Glazer et al, 2018 ).…”