General Medicine

15 Mar Decision Making Accuracy Improved by Slightly Delaying Decision Onset

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr Tobias Teichert Assistant Professor of Psychiatry University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15261 MedicalResearch.com:  What are the main findings of the study? Dr. Teichert:  "Our study provided three main findings: First, we measured how long it takes subjects to allocate attention to a relevant target and how effectively they can block out the distractors. We found that after 120 msec selective attention is fully engaged and completely blocks out the distractor. Based on this finding, we predicted that subjects should be able to improve decision accuracy by delaying decision onset, and that this should be more effective than simply prolonging the whole decision process. Most importantly, we found that subjects indeed use this more effective way of improving decision onset: On average, subjects delayed decision onset by about 50 msec when we asked them be as accurate as possible. The good news is that people seem to use this more optimal mechanism automatically, without being told to do so and without being aware of what they do. The bad news is that we don’t seem to be using this skill quite as effectively as we could. In our case, subjects could have improved accuracy even further by delaying decision onset by an additional 50 ms. However, taken together, our findings show that decision onset is to some degree under cognitive control, and that we might be able to devise training strategies to harness its full potential”