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Leveraging decision consistency to decompose suboptimality in terms of its ultimate predictability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2019

Valentin Wyart*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationnelles, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, 75005 Paris, France. valentin.wyart@ens.frhttp://lnc2.dec.ens.fr/inference-and-decision-making

Abstract

Although the suboptimality of perceptual decision making is indisputable in its strictest sense, characterizing the nature of suboptimalities constitutes a valuable drive for future research. I argue that decision consistency offers a rarely measured, yet important behavioral metric for decomposing suboptimality (or, more generally, deviations from any candidate model of decision making) into ultimately predictable and inherently unpredictable components.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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