Misspecified models create the appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice

TL;DR

This study shows that apparent adaptive control in decision-making can be explained by simpler mechanisms, without needing top-down control.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that value-based decision models with adaptive control can be misspecified, leading to false conclusions about cognitive control.

Findings

Reported evidence for controlled threshold adjustments can be explained by task confounds and alternative models.

A control-free mechanism better explains value-based decisions than models assuming top-down control.

The findings highlight limitations and potential pitfalls in computational approaches to decision-making.

Abstract

Decision scientists have grown increasingly interested in how people adaptively control their decision making, exploring how metacognitive factors influence how people accumulate evidence and commit to a choice. A recent study proposed a novel form of such adaptive control, whereby the values of one's options  contribute to both the formation of a decision and the effortful invigoration of a response. In this framework, the control process was operationalized in a drift diffusion model as the lowering of the decision threshold on difficult trials. Reanalyzing the data from this experiment, we establish alternative explanations for these findings. We show that the reported evidence for controlled threshold adjustments can be explained away by task confounds, time-dependent collapses in decision thresholds, and stimulus-driven dynamics in an alternative form of evidence accumulation. Our findings challenge the specific evidence for this new theory of motivated control while at the same time revealing paths and pitfalls in computational approaches to a more general understanding when and how control guides decision-making.

In a new computational analysis of previous work, this study shows that a control-free mechanism better accounts for value-based decisions than an account that assumes top-down control invigorating the best choice.

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