We wish to acknowledge the contribution of Mark A Nicoletti, M.S. who conducted several aspects of data handling for this study. Financial Disclosures Dr. Frazier has received federal funding or research support from, acted as a consultant to, received travel support from, and/or received a speaker’s honorarium from the Simons Foundation, Forest Laboratories, Ecoeos, IntegraGen, Shire Development, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Dr. Soares has received research grants from BMS, Forest, Merck; he received speaker’s fees from Pfizer and Abbott. Dr. Youngstrom has received travel support from Bristol-Myers Squibb and consulted with Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Lundbeck. None of these sources directly supported or influenced this project. No other authors received financial support relevant
to this project. Conflict of Interest None declared.
Flexibility in the way we make decisions allows us to adapt to changing environments. In one aspect of perceptual decision-making, we make choices about the presence of stimuli in our environment—for Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical example, cues that signal reward or danger. Selleck Crenolanib decision theory suggests that decisions are made through a process whereby sensory evidence is accumulated and compared against a decision criterion (Gold and Shadlen 2007; Deco et al. 2013). The decision criterion is a threshold that determines how much sensory Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical evidence is needed before a stimulus is judged to be present. If accumulated sensory evidence meets the decision criterion, a stimulus is decided to be present, if not, it is judged to be absent. Changes in the decision criterion and the corresponding level of sensory evidence required before a stimulus Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical is judged to be present allow for flexible decision-making (Green and Swets 1966; Bogacz et al. 2006; Ratcliff and McKoon 2008). As behavior, such as
approaching a potential reward or avoiding potential danger, follows Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical from the decisions we make, flexible decision-making can lead to flexible behavior. For example, in a decision environment where there is a high probability of reward it would be beneficial to adopt a decision criterion that is biased toward judging reward cues as present. However, if a similarly biased decision criterion was used in PDK4 an environment where there was a low probability of reward, many reward predicting cues would erroneously be judged to be present and energy would be needlessly expended pursuing rewards that do not exist. Flexible decision-making is, therefore, important for optimizing behavior. Using signal detection theory, the decision criterion can be quantified in terms of response bias (how likely an individual will say a stimulus is present), and the change in response bias between decision environments can be measured (Green and Swets 1966; Macmillan and Creelman 2009).