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Accumulation of Evidence in Decision Making

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Definition

Accumulation of evidence in decision making is the process by which noisy sensory information is sequentially sampled until sufficient evidence has accrued to favor one decision over another or others.

Detailed Description

The accumulation of evidence over time is a central topic in computational neuroscience spanning behavior, brain, and theory (Huk and Meister 2012; Shadlen et al. 2006; Usher and McClelland 2001): (1) it is a fundamental aspect of tractable forms of cognition, such as simple forms of decision making; (2) mathematical models of how evidence could (and should) be accumulated are available and have a rich history of accounting for performance in laboratory tasks; and (3) there is an apparent disconnect between the hundreds of milliseconds over which animals can integrate evidence and the individual computing elements of the brain, neurons, which integrate their inputs over a small number of milliseconds.

Although accumulating evidence over time is a central...

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Correspondence to Alexander C. Huk .

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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Huk, A.C., Katz, L.N., Yates, J.L. (2014). Accumulation of Evidence in Decision Making. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_309-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_309-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7320-6

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Accumulation of Evidence in Decision Making
    Published:
    27 May 2014

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_309-2

  2. Original

    Accumulation of Evidence in Decision Making
    Published:
    14 February 2014

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_309-1