Informational Entropy Threshold as a Physical Mechanism for Explaining Tree-like Decision Making in Humans

While approaches based on physical grounds (such as the drift-diffusion model-DDM) have been exhaustively used in psychology and neuroscience to describe perceptual decision making in humans, similar approaches to complex situations, such as sequential (tree-like) decisions, are still scarce. For such scenarios that involve a reflective prospection of future options, we offer a plausible mechanism based on the idea that subjects can carry out an internal computation of the uncertainty about the different options available, which is computed through the corresponding Shannon entropy. When the amount of information gathered through sensory evidence is enough to reach a given threshold in the entropy, this will trigger the decision. Experimental evidence in favor of this entropy-based mechanism was provided by exploring human performance during navigation through a maze on a computer screen monitored with the help of eye trackers. In particular, our analysis allows us to prove that (i) prospection is effectively used by humans during such navigation tasks, and an indirect quantification of the level of prospection used is attainable; in addition, (ii) the distribution of decision times during the task exhibits power-law tails, a feature that our entropy-based mechanism is able to explain, unlike traditional (DDM-like) frameworks

On the Nature of Everyday Prospection: A Review and Theoretical Integration of Research on Mind-Wandering, Future Thinking, and Prospective Memory

© 2020 The Authors. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published by Sage Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. It is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268020918843The ability to imagine and simulate events that may happen in the future has been studied in several related but independent research areas (e.g., episodic future thinking, mind-wandering, prospective memory), with a newly emerging field of involuntary future thinking focusing primarily on the spontaneous occurrence of such thoughts. In this article, we review evidence from these diverse fields to address important questions about why do people think about the future, what are the typical and most frequent contents of such thoughts, and how do these thoughts occur (are they spontaneous or constructed deliberately). Results of the literature review provide support for the pragmatic theory of prospection, by showing that when people engage in prospective thought naturally, without being explicitly instructed to do so, they predominantly think about their upcoming tasks and planned activities instead of simulating plausible but novel hypothetical scenarios. Moreover, prospective thoughts are more often spontaneous than deliberate and effortful, and their occurrence seems to increase the likelihood of planned activities being completed in the future. The findings are discussed in the context of a new “pragmatic dual process account” of future thinking, and new avenues for future research on prospection are outlined.Peer reviewe

Free Will as a Psychological Accomplishment

I offer analyses of free will in terms of a complex set of psychological capacities agents possess to varying degrees and have varying degrees of opportunities to exercise effectively, focusing on the under-appreciated but essential capacities for imagination. For an agent to have free will is for her to possess the psychological capacities to make decisions—to imagine alternatives for action, to select among them, and to control her actions accordingly—such that she is the author of her actions and can deserve credit or blame for them. For an agent to act of her own free will is for her to have had (reasonable) opportunity to exercise these capacities in making her decision and acting. There is a long philosophical tradition of treating free will as the set of capacities that, when properly functioning, allow us to make decisions that contribute to our leading a good or flourishing life. On this view, free will is a psychological accomplishment. Free will allows us to be the causal source of our actions in a way that is compatible with determinism and naturalism

Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: A dual process account

© 2019 Springer Nature.This is the final published version of an article published in Psychological Research, licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-bution 4.0 International License. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01262-7.In this article, we address an apparent paradox in the literature on mental time travel and mind-wandering: How is it possible that future thinking is both constructive, yet often experienced as occurring spontaneously? We identify and describe two ‘routes’ whereby episodic future thoughts are brought to consciousness, with each of the ‘routes’ being associated with separable cognitive processes and functions. Voluntary future thinking relies on controlled, deliberate and slow cognitive processing. The other, termed involuntary or spontaneous future thinking, relies on automatic processes that allows ‘fully-fledged’ episodic future thoughts to freely come to mind, often triggered by internal or external cues. To unravel the paradox, we propose that the majority of spontaneous future thoughts are ‘pre-made’ (i.e., each spontaneous future thought is a re-iteration of a previously constructed future event), and therefore based on simple, well-understood, memory processes. We also propose that the pre-made hypothesis explains why spontaneous future thoughts occur rapidly, are similar to involuntary memories, and predominantly about upcoming tasks and goals. We also raise the possibility that spontaneous future thinking is the default mode of imagining the future. This dual process approach complements and extends standard theoretical approaches that emphasise constructive simulation, and outlines novel opportunities for researchers examining voluntary and spontaneous forms of future thinking.Peer reviewe

Minding Accidents

Tort doctrine states that breach is all about conduct. Unlike in the criminal law, where jurors must engage in an amateur form of mindreading to evaluate mens rea, jurors are told that they can assess civil negligence by looking only at how the defendant behaved. But this is false. Foreseeability is at the heart of negligence—appearing as the primary tests for duty, breach, and proximate cause. And yet, we cannot ask whether a defendant should have foreseen a risk without interrogating what he subjectively knew, remembered, perceived, or realized at the time. In fact, the focus on actions in negligence is misleading, because unreasonable actions are not necessary for negligence liability, while a negligent mental state is. Unfortunately, when we assume that foreseeability can be assessed objectively through conduct, this encourages significant hindsight bias. Jurors are left rudderless—free to replace what *could* have been foreseen with what they think *should* have been in retrospect. Further, while the outputs of mental states can be labeled reasonable or unreasonable, the underlying mental states themselves cannot be. There is no such thing as “objectively reasonable memory” or “objectively reasonable perception.” If there were, it would need to be keyed to a population standard of poor performance, as typical adults are lousy at foresight. If we are committed to negligence being based on breach and not being simply a form of wealth redistribution or compensation, we must pay more attention to whether a particular defendant is capable of foresight. This article argues that foresight has been deemed a “vexing morass” and a “malleable standard” precisely because we fail to treat it as an epistemic construct—similar to intent, knowledge, or recklessness. Given the foregoing, I propose a revision to the elements of negligence to recognize foresight as mental state. While relying heavily on the current prima facie elements, I reshuffle them to focus the jury’s attention on the descriptive inquiries and the judge’s attention on the normative ones. In addition to reducing hindsight bias by emphasizing the defendant’s capacity for foresight, my proposal also has the added benefit of better distinguishing the tests for duty, breach and proximate cause, which presently overlap and blur the roles of judge and jury

[Editorial] Information technology governance in Internet of Things supply chain networks

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Endogenicity and awareness in voluntary action

The idea that we can trigger and control our actions at will is central to our experience as agents. Here, we investigated different cognitive mechanisms involved in voluntary action control. In the first part of the thesis, we investigated the relationship between motor preparation and awareness of intention. To do so, we used spontaneous action paradigms and combined them with novel random and real-time EEG probing techniques. We investigated two main questions. First, do people know that they are about to do something before they do it? Second, to what extent are delayed intention judgements informed by prospective motor preparation rather than retrospective reconstruction? Our findings suggest that people have some feeling of motor intention before acting and can use it to voluntarily control action initiation in real-time. However, their recall-based intention judgements are strongly influenced by overt events happening after the time of probing. Because most daily-life voluntary actions occur in interaction with the environment, in the second part of the thesis we embedded self-paced actions in a decision-making context. We investigated two ways in which endogenous factors can contribute to action selection. First, as a symmetry-breaking mechanism in contexts of external ambiguity. Second, by top-down modulating decision-making processes. We identified the neural correlates of an internal decision-variable that tracks perceptual decisions and also indexes dynamic changes in endogenous goals. Further, we show that the readiness potential can be found not only preceding spontaneous actions, but also in contexts where actions are informed by evidence but preserve a self-paced nature. In sum, this thesis provides new insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying conscious experience of intention and provides new tools to investigate voluntary control over action initiation and selection processes