Deciding While Acting—Mid-Movement Decisions Are More Strongly Affected by Action Probability than Reward Amount

Abstract

When deciding while acting, such as sequentially selecting targets during naturalistic foraging, movement trajectories reveal the dynamics of the unfolding decision process. Ongoing and planned actions may impact decisions in these situations in addition to expected reward outcomes. Here, we test how strongly humans weigh and how fast they integrate individual constituents of expected value, namely the prior probability (PROB) of an action and the prior expected reward amount (AMNT) associated with an action, when deciding based on the combination of both together during an ongoing movement. Unlike other decision-making studies, we focus on PROB and AMNT priors, and not final evidence, in that correct actions were either instructed or could be chosen freely. This means, there was no decision-making under risk. We show that both priors gradually influence movement trajectories already before mid-movement instructions of the correct target and bias free-choice behavior. These effects were consistently stronger for PROB compared with AMNT priors. Participants biased their movements toward a high-PROB target, committed to it faster when instructed or freely chosen, and chose it more frequently even when it was associated with a lower AMNT prior than the alternative option. Despite these differences in effect magnitude, the time course of the effect of both priors on movement direction was highly similar. We conclude that prior action probability, and hence the associated possibility to plan actions accordingly, has higher behavioral relevance than prior action value for decisions that are expressed by adjusting already ongoing movements.