It is the price it pays for freedom from the immediacy AC220 supplier of sensation and action. Deciding

when is as important as deciding whether. Interestingly, it has been proposed that deciding when can be explained by a bounded accumulation mechanism like the one in Figure 2A (Simen et al., 2011). Obviously, not all decisions revolve around perception. This section serves a dual purpose: (1) to extend and amend principles that arise in other types of decisions that have been studied in neurophysiology and (2) to examine a few cognitive processes from the perspective of decision making. An open question is whether the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual decisions are similar to those involving decisions about value and social interactions (Rorie and Newsome, 2005). Value-based decisions involve choices among goods, money, food, and punishments. Social decisions involve mating, fighting, sharing, and establishing dominance. Both incorporate evidence (e.g., what is the valence of the juice or what is my rival about to do), but the process underlying these assessments is not the focus, because this is typically the easy part of the problem—analogous to an easy perceptual decision (Deaner et al., 2005, Platt and Glimcher, 1999, Rorie

et al., 2010 and Padoa-Schioppa, 2011). As we pointed out earlier in the essay, value has been integrated into signal detection theory and all mathematical formalisms of decision theory in economics. We R428 molecular weight would like to focus on one issue that might distinguish value-based and social decision making from perceptual decision making. It concerns an almost philosophical issue about randomness in behavior. It is common to model many social decisions as competitive games. This has led to the concept of a premium on being unpredictable. If this is correct, then social decisions differ fundamentally from perceptual decisions, because the former embraces a decision rule that is effectively a consultation

with a random number generator. Consider a binary choice and imagine that the brain has accumulated evidence that renders one choice better than the other with probability 0.7. According to some game-theoretic approaches, medroxyprogesterone the agent should choose that option probabilistically as if flipping a weighted coin that will come up heads with probability 0.7 (Barraclough et al., 2004, Glimcher, 2005, Karlsson et al., 2012, Lau and Glimcher, 2005 and Sugrue et al., 2005) (but see Krajbich et al., 2012 and Webb, 2013). This way of thinking is antithetical to the way we think about the variation in choice in perceptual decisions. Such variation arises because the evidence is noisy. In the discussion of certainty (above), we pointed out that a DV is associated with a probability or degree of belief, but the decision rule is itself deterministic. For example, suppose that in the RDM task, on some trial, the DV is positive (meaning favoring rightward) and happens to correspond to p = 0.7 that the rightward choice is correct.