How the Brain Stops Dithering and Decides

What is it about?

Best choice tasks are optimal stopping problem that require subjects to view a list of options one at a time and decide whether to take or decline each option. The goal is to find a high ranking option in the list. The decision to take or decline an option is thought of as a value comparison process. Brain regions previously implicated in in evidence integration and reward representation encode threshold crossings that trigger decisions to commit to a choice.

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Why is it important?

This is the first study to examine where value computations are computed in the brain related to solving the secretary problem, a classical example of an optimal stopping problem that is well studied mathematically. Interestingly, the brains areas engaged when deciding to continue sampling information versus deciding to take a current option overlap with areas activated in related information sampling tasks to suggest possible common mechanisms for information sampling in the brain.