Evans Nathan J, Hawkins Guy E, Boehm Udo, Wagenmakers Eric-Jan, Brown Scott D
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA.
School of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia.
Sci Rep. 2017 Nov 27;7(1):16433. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-16694-7.
We investigate a question relevant to the psychology and neuroscience of perceptual decision-making: whether decisions are based on steadily accumulating evidence, or only on the most recent evidence. We report an empirical comparison between two of the most prominent examples of these theoretical positions, the diffusion model and the urgency-gating model, via model-based qualitative and quantitative comparisons. Our findings support the predictions of the diffusion model over the urgency-gating model, and therefore, the notion that evidence accumulates without much decay. Gross qualitative patterns and fine structural details of the data are inconsistent with the notion that decisions are based only on the most recent evidence. More generally, we discuss some strengths and weaknesses of scientific methods that investigate quantitative models by distilling the formal models to qualitative predictions.
决策是基于不断积累的证据，还是仅基于最新的证据。我们通过基于模型的定性和定量比较，报告了这两种最突出的理论立场示例——扩散模型和紧急门控模型之间的实证比较。我们的研究结果支持扩散模型而非紧急门控模型的预测，因此支持证据在没有太多衰减的情况下积累的观点。数据的总体定性模式和精细结构细节与决策仅基于最新证据的观点不一致。更广泛地说，我们讨论了通过将形式模型提炼为定性预测来研究定量模型的科学方法的一些优缺点。
