title: Do humans make good decisions?
abstract: Human performance on perceptual classification tasks approaches that of an ideal observer, but economic decisions are often inconsistent and intransitive, with preferences reversing according to the local context. We discuss the view that suboptimal choices may result from the efficient coding of decision-relevant information, a strategy that allows expected inputs to be processed with higher gain than unexpected inputs. Efficient coding leads to 'robust' decisions that depart from optimality but maximise the information transmitted by a limited-capacity system in a rapidly-changing world. We review recent work showing that when perceptual environments are variable or volatile, perceptual decisions exhibit the same suboptimal context-dependence as economic choices, and we propose a general computational framework that accounts for findings across the two domains.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, OX1 3UD, Oxford, UK. Electronic address: christopher.summerfield@psy.ox.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Summerfield
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, OX1 3UD, Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Konstantinos
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tsetsos
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003657:Decision Making; D004467:Economics; D006801:Humans; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: efficient coding; gain control; information integration; neuroeconomics; optimality; perceptual decision-making