What comes next? response times are affected by mispredictions in a stochastic game

TL;DR

This study investigates how response times in a stochastic game are influenced by past prediction successes or failures, revealing that recent outcomes affect decision speed and that this effect extends up to two steps ahead.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that response times depend on previous prediction outcomes and their propagation, a novel insight into decision-making dynamics in stochastic games.

Findings

Response times depend on previous prediction success or failure.

The influence of past outcomes propagates up to two steps forward.

Response time distribution is affected by the sequence of past choices.

Abstract

Acting as a goalkeeper in a video-game, a participant is asked to predict the successive choices of the penalty taker. The sequence of choices of the penalty taker is generated by a stochastic chain with memory of variable length. It has been conjectured that the probability distribution of the response times is a function of the specific sequence of past choices governing the algorithm used by the penalty taker to make his choice at each step. We found empirical evidence that besides this dependence, the distribution of the response times depends also on the success or failure of the previous prediction made by the participant. Moreover, we found statistical evidence that this dependence propagates up to two steps forward after the prediction failure.