Golmohamadian Masoumeh, Faraji Mehrbod, Fallah Fatemeh, Sharifizadeh Fatemeh, Ebrahimpour Reza
School of Cognitive Sciences (SCS), Institute for Research in Fundamental Science (IPM), Tehran, Iran.
Department of Computer Engineering, Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Tehran, Iran.
PLoS One. 2025 Jan 14;20(1):e0316320. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0316320. eCollection 2025.
The brain can remarkably adapt its decision-making process to suit the dynamic environment and diverse aims and demands. The brain's flexibility can be classified into three categories: flexibility in choosing solutions, decision policies, and actions. We employ two experiments to explore flexibility in decision policy: a visual object categorization task and an auditory object categorization task. Both tasks required participants to accumulate discrete evidence over time, with the only difference being the sensory state of the stimuli. We aim to investigate how the brain demonstrates flexibility in selecting decision policies in different sensory contexts when the solution and action remain the same. Our results indicate that the decision policy of the brain in integrating information is independent of inter-pulse interval across these two tasks. However, the decision policy based on how the brain ranks the first and second pulse of evidence changes flexibly. We show that the sequence of pulses does not affect the choice accuracy in the auditory mode. However, in the visual mode, the first pulse had the larger leverage on decisions. Our research underscores the importance of incorporating diverse contexts to improve our understanding of the brain's flexibility in real-world decision-making.
大脑能够显著地调整其决策过程，以适应动态环境以及多样的目标和需求。大脑的灵活性可分为三类：在选择解决方案、决策策略和行动方面的灵活性。我们采用两个实验来探究决策策略的灵活性：一个视觉物体分类任务和一个听觉物体分类任务。这两个任务都要求参与者随着时间积累离散证据，唯一的区别在于刺激的感官状态。我们旨在研究当解决方案和行动保持不变时，大脑在不同感官情境中如何展示出选择决策策略的灵活性。我们的结果表明，大脑在整合信息时的决策策略在这两个任务中与脉冲间隔无关。然而，基于大脑如何对证据的第一个和第二个脉冲进行排序的决策策略会灵活变化。我们表明，脉冲序列在听觉模式下不影响选择准确性。然而，在视觉模式下，第一个脉冲对决策的影响更大。我们的研究强调了纳入多样情境对于增进我们对大脑在现实世界决策中灵活性理解的重要性。
