Scientists Discover the Secret to Better Decision Making
A delay of just a mere fraction of a second may improve the brain’s decision-making accuracy, researchers found. The new findings may help scientists further understand neuropsychiatric conditions characterised by abnormalities in cognitive function and lead to new training strategies to improve decision-making in high-stake environments.
"Decision making isn’t always easy, and sometimes we make errors on seemingly trivial tasks, especially if multiple sources of information compete for our attention," said first author Tobias Teichert, PhD, a postdoctoral research scientist in neuroscience at CUMC at the time of the study and now an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. "We have identified a novel mechanism that is surprisingly effective at improving response accuracy.
In the study, Teichert and his colleagues found that postponing the onset of the decision process by as little as 50 to 100 milliseconds allows the brain to focus attention on the most relevant information and block out irrelevant distracters. "This way, rather than working longer or harder at making the decision, the brain simply postpones the decision onset to a more beneficial point in time." said Jack Grinband, PhD, associate research scientist in the Taub Institute and assistant professor of clinical radiology (physics), and one of the researchers.
When making decisions, the brain integrates many small pieces of potentially contradictory sensory information, Teichert explained. "Imagine that you’re coming up to a traffic light—the target—and need to decide whether the light is red or green," said Dr. Teichert. "There is typically little ambiguity, and you make the correct decision quickly, in a matter of tens of milliseconds." But the decision process itself does not distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. Hence, a task is made more difficult if irrelevant information—a distractor—interferes with the processing of the target.
The new study was based on previous findings suggesting that the brain’s response accuracy can be improved by prolonging the decision process, as it allows the brain to collect more information. The researchers thought that a more effective way to reduce errors might be to delay the decision process so that it starts out with better information.
For the study, the researchers conducted a series of experiments. In the first, subjects were shown what looked like a swarm of randomly moving dots (the target stimulus) on a computer monitor and were asked to judge whether the overall motion was to the left or right. A second and brighter set of moving dots (which served as a distractor) appeared simultaneously in the same location, obscuring the motion of the target. When the distractor dots moved in the same direction as the target dots, subjects performed with near-perfect accuracy, but when the distractor dots moved in the opposite direction, the error rate increased. The subjects were asked to perform the task either as quickly or as accurately as possible; they were free to respond at any time after the onset of the stimulus.
The second experiment was similar to the first, except that the subjects also heard regular clicks, indicating when they had to respond. The time allowed for viewing the dots varied between 17 and 500 milliseconds. This condition simulates real-life situations, such as driving, where the time to respond is beyond the driver’s control. "Manipulating how long the subject viewed the stimulus before responding allowed us to determine how quickly the brain is able to block out the distractors and focus on the target dots," said Dr. Grinband.
Their findings, published in the journal PLoS ONE, showed that decision onset is, to some extent, under cognitive control. Teichert said their study provides insights into the fundamental brain processes and yields clues as to what might be going wrong in diseases such as ADHD and schizophrenia, and may lead to new training strategies to improve decision making in complex high-stakes environments, such as air traffic control towers and military combat.
Source of this article:
Humans Optimize Decision-Making by Delaying Decision Onset
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