Content area

Abstract

The brain can remarkably adapt its decision-making process to suit the dynamic environment and diverse aims and demands. The brain’s flexibility can be classified into three categories: flexibility in choosing solutions, decision policies, and actions. We employ two experiments to explore flexibility in decision policy: a visual object categorization task and an auditory object categorization task. Both tasks required participants to accumulate discrete evidence over time, with the only difference being the sensory state of the stimuli. We aim to investigate how the brain demonstrates flexibility in selecting decision policies in different sensory contexts when the solution and action remain the same. Our results indicate that the decision policy of the brain in integrating information is independent of inter-pulse interval across these two tasks. However, the decision policy based on how the brain ranks the first and second pulse of evidence changes flexibly. We show that the sequence of pulses does not affect the choice accuracy in the auditory mode. However, in the visual mode, the first pulse had the larger leverage on decisions. Our research underscores the importance of incorporating diverse contexts to improve our understanding of the brain’s flexibility in real-world decision-making.

Details

1009240
Location
Title
Flexibility in choosing decision policies in gathering discrete evidence over time
Publication title
PLoS One; San Francisco
Volume
20
Issue
1
First page
e0316320
Publication year
2025
Publication date
Jan 2025
Section
Research Article
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Place of publication
San Francisco
Country of publication
United States
e-ISSN
19326203
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
Publication history
 
 
Milestone dates
2024-08-07 (Received); 2024-12-10 (Accepted); 2025-01-14 (Published)
ProQuest document ID
3155638445
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/flexibility-choosing-decision-policies-gathering/docview/3155638445/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
© 2025 Golmohamadian et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2025-01-15
Database
ProQuest One Academic