New publication in the journal "PLOS – Computational Biology"
9 December 2022, by Celestina Hermida da Costa
Fontanesi et al. published the article "Disentangling choice value and choice conflict in sequential decision under risk" in the journal 'PLOS - Computational Biology'. Among the authors is Prof. Dr. Sebastian Gluth, head of the research area 'General Psychology'. The article identifies the critical confound in the research area that deals with how people make sequential decisions under risk. It distinguishes between (a) the value of switching and (b) the amount of conflict between the decision to stay or to switch. Using a previously proposed paradigm (i.e., the pig dice game) as an example, they replicated the behavior of a recent study and showed that switch value is highly correlated with choice conflict. By simulating behavior across hypothetical contexts, they identified and tested novel variants of this task that allow to deconfound switch value and conflict. Using sequential sampling modeling, they concluded that it is conflict rather than switch value that drives response times in this task.