This Week in The Journal

How do people balance speed and accuracy during decision-making?To make decisions, the brain gathers evidence and commits to a choice when enough information has accumulated.In this issue, Kira et al. explored how flexible the threshold of sufficient evidence accumulation is in response to costs associated with the time it takes to deliberate.In their study, participants judged the direction of motion in random-dot displays of varying difficulty.Participant choices and reaction times followed the patterns expected from an evidence accumulation process: the amount of evidence to inform a choice gradually decreased as time passed within a trial.Partway through trials, and without the participants' awareness, the authors introduced random deadlines that caused some trials to end prematurely.Kira and colleagues used a computational method they developed to estimate decision-making changes over time.This approach confirmed that the amount of information required for a decision decreases as a function of time and that this reduction in evidence criteria occurs even faster under time pressure.According to the authors, these findings highlight the brain's flexibility in determining when to stop deliberating and commit to a choice.