A Theory of Decision Making Under Dynamic Context

Abstract

The dynamics of simple decisions are well understood and modeled as a class of random walk models [e.g. 1-4]. However, most real-life decisions include a dynamically-changing influence of additional information we call context. In this work, we describe a computational theory of decision making under dynamically shifting context. We show how the model generalizes the dominant existing model of fixed-context decision making [2] and can be built up from a weighted combination of fixed-context decisions evolving simultaneously. We also show how the model generalizes recent work on the control of attention in the Flanker task [5]. Finally, we show how the model recovers qualitative data patterns in another task of longstanding psychological interest, the AX Continuous Performance Test [6], using the same model parameters.