The importance of urgency in decision making based on dynamic information

Abstract

A standard view in the literature is that decisions are the result of a process that accumulates evidence in favor of each alternative until such accumulation reaches a threshold and a decision is made. However, this view has been recently questioned by an alternative proposal that suggests that, instead of accumulated, evidence is combined with an urgency signal. Both theories have been mathematically formalized and supported by a variety of decision-making tasks with constant information. However, recently, tasks with changing information have shown to be more effective to study the dynamics of decision making. Recent research using one of such tasks, the tokens task, has shown that decisions are better described by an urgency mechanism than by an accumulation one. However, the results of that study could depend on a task where all fundamental information was noiseless and always present, favoring a mechanism of non-integration, such as the urgency one. Here, we wanted to address whether the same conclusions were also supported by an experimental paradigm in which sensory evidence was removed shortly after it was provided, making working memory necessary to properly perform the task. Here, we show that, under such condition, participants’ behavior could be explained by an urgency-gating mechanism that low-pass filters the mnemonic information and combines it with an urgency signal that grows with time but not by an accumulation process that integrates the same mnemonic information. Thus, our study supports the idea that, under certain situations with dynamic sensory information, decisions are better explained by an urgency-gating mechanism than by an accumulation one.