Have a personal or library account? Click to login
Fluctuations in Sequential Many-Alternative Decisions Reveal Strategies Beyond Immediate Reward Maximisation Cover

Fluctuations in Sequential Many-Alternative Decisions Reveal Strategies Beyond Immediate Reward Maximisation

Open Access
|Nov 2025

References

  1. 1Agrawal, M., Mattar, M. G., Cohen, J. D., & Daw, N. D. (2022). The temporal dynamics of opportunity costs: A normative account of cognitive fatigue and boredom. Psychological Review, 129(3), 564585. 10.1037/rev0000309
  2. 2Alméras, C., Chambon, V., & Wyart, V. (2021). Competing cognitive pressures on human exploration in the absence of trade-off with exploitation. Preprint. 10.31234/osf.io/9qpuz
  3. 3Antinori, A., Carter, O. L., & Smillie, L. D. (2017). Seeing it both ways: Openness to experience and binocular rivalry suppression. Journal of Research in Personality, 68, 1522. 10.1016/j.jrp.2017.03.005
  4. 4Ariely, D. (2000). Controlling the Information Flow: Effects on Consumers’ Decision Making and Preferences. Journal of Consumer Research, 27(2), 233248. 10.1086/314322
  5. 5Attneave, F. (1955). Symmetry, information, and memory for patterns. The American journal of psychology, 68(2), 209222. 10.2307/1418892
  6. 6Averbeck, B. B. (2015). Theory of Choice in Bandit, Information Sampling and Foraging Tasks. PLOS Computational Biology, 11(3), e1004164. 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004164
  7. 7Beck, J. M., Ma, W. J., Pitkow, X., Latham, P. E., & Pouget, A. (2012). Not Noisy, Just Wrong: The Role of Suboptimal Inference in Behavioral Variability. Neuron, 74(1), 3039. 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.03.016
  8. 8Berger-Tal, O., Nathan, J., Meron, E., & Saltz, D. (2014). The Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma: A Multidisciplinary Framework. PLOS ONE, 9(4), e95693. 10.1371/journal.pone.0095693
  9. 9Blanchard, T. C., Hayden, B. Y., & Bromberg-Martin, E. S. (2015). Orbitofrontal Cortex Uses Distinct Codes for Different Choice Attributes in Decisions Motivated by Curiosity. Neuron, 85(3), 602614. 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.12.050
  10. 10Bromberg-Martin, E. S., & Hikosaka, O. (2009). Midbrain Dopamine Neurons Signal Preference for Advance Information about Upcoming Rewards. Neuron, 63(1), 119126. 10.1016/j.neuron.2009.06.009
  11. 11Bromberg-Martin, E. S., & Monosov, I. E. (2020). Neural circuitry of information seeking. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 35, 6270. 10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.07.006
  12. 12Bussche, E. V. den, Alves, M., Murray, Y. P. J., & Hughes, G. (2020). The effect of cognitive effort on the sense of agency. PLOS ONE, 15(8), e0236809. 10.1371/journal.pone.0236809
  13. 13Carstensen, L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M., & Charles, S. T. (1999). Taking time seriously: A theory of socioemotional selectivity. American Psychologist, 54(3), 165181. 10.1037/0003-066X.54.3.165
  14. 14Cheadle, S., Wyart, V., Tsetsos, K., Myers, N., de Gardelle, V., Herce Castañón, S., & Summerfield, C. (2014). Adaptive Gain Control during Human Perceptual Choice. Neuron, 81(6), 14291441. 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.01.020
  15. 15Chronopoulos, M., De Reyck, B., & Siddiqui, A. (2011). Optimal investment under operational flexibility, risk aversion, and uncertainty. European Journal of Operational Research, 213(1), 221237. 10.1016/j.ejor.2011.03.007
  16. 16Cogliati Dezza, I., Yu, A. J., Cleeremans, A., & Alexander, W. (2017). Learning the value of information and reward over time when solving exploration-exploitation problems. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 16919. 10.1038/s41598-017-17237-w
  17. 17Cohen, J. D., McClure, S. M., & Yu, A. J. (2007). Should I stay or should I go? How the human brain manages the trade-off between exploitation and exploration. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1481), 933942. 10.1098/rstb.2007.2098
  18. 18Dajani, D. R., & Uddin, L. Q. (2015). Demystifying cognitive flexibility: Implications for clinical and developmental neuroscience. Trends in Neurosciences, 38(9), 571578. 10.1016/j.tins.2015.07.003
  19. 19Danckert, J. (2019). Boredom: Managing the Delicate Balance Between Exploration and Exploitation. En J. Ros Velasco (Ed.), Boredom Is in Your Mind: A Shared Psychological-Philosophical Approach (pp. 3753). Springer International Publishing. 10.1007/978-3-030-26395-9_3
  20. 20Daw, N. D., O’Doherty, J. P., Dayan, P., Seymour, B., & Dolan, R. J. (2006). Cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans. Nature, 441(7095), 876879. 10.1038/nature04766
  21. 21De Lange, F. P., Jensen, O., & Dehaene, S. (2010). Accumulation of Evidence during Sequential Decision Making: The Importance of Top–Down Factors. The Journal of Neuroscience, 30(2), 731738. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4080-09.2010
  22. 22Dhawale, A. K., Smith, M. A., & Ölveczky, B. P. (2017). The Role of Variability in Motor Learning. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 40(1), 479498. 10.1146/annurev-neuro-072116-031548
  23. 23Dow, J., & Werlang, S. R. da C. (1992). Uncertainty Aversion, Risk Aversion, and the Optimal Choice of Portfolio. Econometrica, 60(1), 197204. 10.2307/2951685
  24. 24Drugowitsch, J., Moreno-Bote, R., Churchland, A. K., Shadlen, M. N., & Pouget, A. (2012). The Cost of Accumulating Evidence in Perceptual Decision Making. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(11), 36123628. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4010-11.2012
  25. 25Evans, D. A., Stempel, A. V., Vale, R., & Branco, T. (2019). Cognitive Control of Escape Behaviour. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(4), 334348. 10.1016/J.TICS.2019.01.012
  26. 26Faisal, A. A., Selen, L. P. J., & Wolpert, D. M. (2008). Noise in the nervous system. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(4), Article 4. 10.1038/nrn2258
  27. 27Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 84108415. 10.1073/pnas.1319030111
  28. 28Garrett, D. D., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., MacDonald, S. W. S., Lindenberger, U., McIntosh, A. R., & Grady, C. L. (2013). Moment-to-moment brain signal variability: A next frontier in human brain mapping? Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(4), 610624. 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.02.015
  29. 29Geana, A., & Daw, N. (2016). Boredom, Information-Seeking and Exploration. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 17511756.
  30. 30Gershman, S. J. (2019). Uncertainty and exploration. Decision, 6(3), 277286. 10.1037/dec0000101
  31. 31Gigante, G., Mattia, M., Braun, J., & Del Giudice, P. (2009). Bistable Perception Modeled as Competing Stochastic Integrations at Two Levels. PLOS Computational Biology, 5(7). 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000430
  32. 32Glaze, C. M., Kable, J. W., & Gold, J. I. (2015). Normative evidence accumulation in unpredictable environments. eLife, 4, e08825. 10.7554/eLife.08825
  33. 33Gottlieb, J. (2012). Attention, Learning, and the Value of Information. Neuron, 76(2), 281295. 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.09.034
  34. 34Green, L., & Myerson, J. (2004). A Discounting Framework for Choice With Delayed and Probabilistic Rewards. Psychological Bulletin, 130(5), 769792. 10.1037/0033-2909.130.5.769
  35. 35Green, R. F. (1984). Stopping Rules for Optimal Foragers. The American Naturalist, 123(1), 3043. 10.1086/284184
  36. 36Hayden, B. Y., Pearson, J. M., & Platt, M. L. (2009). Fictive reward signals in the anterior cingulate cortex. Science (New York, N.Y.), 324(5929), 948950. 10.1126/science.1168488
  37. 37Hon, N., & Yeo, N. (2021). Having a sense of agency can improve memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28(3), 946952. 10.3758/s13423-020-01849-x
  38. 38Hunt, L. T., Daw, N. D., Kaanders, P., MacIver, M. A., Mugan, U., Procyk, E., Redish, A. D., Russo, E., Scholl, J., Stachenfeld, K., Wilson, C. R. E., & Kolling, N. (2021). Formalizing planning and information search in naturalistic decision-making. Nature Neuroscience, 24(8), 10511064. 10.1038/s41593-021-00866-w
  39. 39Inzlicht, M., Shenhav, A., & Olivola, C. Y. (2018). The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(4), 337349. 10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.007
  40. 40Kelly, C. A., & Sharot, T. (2021). Individual differences in information-seeking. Nature Communications, 12(1), 7062. 10.1038/s41467-021-27046-5
  41. 41Kloosterman, N. A., De Gee, J. W., Bergner, M. W., Lindenberger, U., Garrett, D. D., & Fahrenfort, J. J. (2019). Humans strategically shift decision bias by flexibly adjusting sensory evidence accumulation. eLife, 8. 10.7554/eLife.37321
  42. 42Kool, W., McGuire, J. T., Rosen, Z. B., & Botvinick, M. M. (2010). Decision Making and the Avoidance of Cognitive Demand. Journal of experimental psychology. General, 139(4), 665682. 10.1037/a0020198
  43. 43Kurzban, R. (2016). The sense of effort. Current Opinion in Psychology, 7, 6770. 10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.08.003
  44. 44Kurzban, R., Duckworth, A., Kable, J. W., & Myers, J. (2013). An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(6), 661679. 10.1017/S0140525X12003196
  45. 45Lee, J. K., Rouault, M., & Wyart, V. (2023). Adaptive tuning of human learning and choice variability to unexpected uncertainty. Science Advances, 9(13), eadd0501. 10.1126/sciadv.add0501
  46. 46Loewenstein, G., & Molnar, A. (2018). The renaissance of belief-based utility in economics. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(3), Article 3. 10.1038/s41562-018-0301-z
  47. 47Markant, D. B., & Gureckis, T. M. (2014). Is it better to select or to receive? Learning via active and passive hypothesis testing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 94122. 10.1037/a0032108
  48. 48Markant, D. B., Ruggeri, A., Gureckis, T. M., & Xu, F. (2016). Enhanced Memory as a Common Effect of Active Learning. Mind, Brain, and Education, 10(3), 142152. 10.1111/mbe.12117
  49. 49Markowitz, J. E., Gillis, W. F., Jay, M., Wood, J., Harris, R. W., Cieszkowski, R., Scott, R., Brann, D., Koveal, D., Kula, T., Weinreb, C., Osman, M., Pinto, S., Uchiida, N., Linderman, S., Sabatini, B., & Datta S. (2023). Spontaneous behaviour is structured by reinforcement without explicit reward. Nature, 614(7946). 10.1038/s41586-022-05611-2
  50. 50Milyavskaya, M., Galla, B. M., Inzlicht, M., & Duckworth, A. L. (2021). More Effort, Less Fatigue: The Role of Interest in Increasing Effort and Reducing Mental Fatigue. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.755858
  51. 51Mooneyham, B. W., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: A review. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 67(1), 1118. 10.1037/a0031569
  52. 52Moreno-Bote, R., Ramírez-Ruiz, J., Drugowitsch, J., & Hayden, B. Y. (2020). Heuristics and optimal solutions to the breadth:depth dilemma. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(33), 1979919808. 10.1073/PNAS.2004929117
  53. 53Ölveczky, B. P., Andalman, A. S., & Fee, M. S. (2005). Vocal Experimentation in the Juvenile Songbird Requires a Basal Ganglia Circuit. PLOS Biology, 3(5), e153. 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030153
  54. 54Ölveczky, B. P., Otchy, T. M., Goldberg, J. H., Aronov, D., & Fee, M. S. (2011). Changes in the neural control of a complex motor sequence during learning. Journal of Neurophysiology, 106(1), 386397. 10.1152/jn.00018.2011
  55. 55Petitet, P., Attaallah, B., Manohar, S. G., & Husain, M. (2021). The computational cost of active information sampling before decision-making under uncertainty. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(7), 935946. 10.1038/s41562-021-01116-6
  56. 56Pisupati, S., Chartarifsky-Lynn, L., Khanal, A., & Churchland, A.K. (2021). Lapses in perceptual decisions reflect exploration. eLife, 10. 10.7554/eLife.55490
  57. 57Rahnev, D., & Denison, R. N. (2018). Suboptimality in perceptual decision making. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e223. 10.1017/S0140525X18000936
  58. 58Ramírez-Ruiz, J., Grytskyy, D., Mastrogiuseppe, C., Habib, Y., & Moreno-Bote, R. (2024). Complex behavior from intrinsic motivation to occupy future action-state path space. Nature Communications, 15(1), 6368. 10.1038/s41467-024-49711-1
  59. 59Renart, A., & Machens, C. K. (2014). Variability in neural activity and behavior. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 25, 211220. 10.1016/j.conb.2014.02.013
  60. 60Rényi, A. (1961). On measures of entropy and information. Mathematical Institute Hungarian Academy Of Sciences.
  61. 61Risko, E. F., Anderson, N. C., Lanthier, S., & Kingstone, A. (2012). Curious eyes: Individual differences in personality predict eye movement behavior in scene-viewing. Cognition, 122(1), 8690. 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.08.014
  62. 62Sang, K., Todd, P. M., Goldstone, R. L., & Hills, T. T. (2020). Simple Threshold Rules Solve Explore/Exploit Trade-offs in a Resource Accumulation Search Task. Cognitive Science, 44(2), e12817. 10.1111/cogs.12817
  63. 63Schulz, E., Bhui, R., Love, B. C., Brier, B., Todd, M. T., & Gershman, S. J. (2019). Structured, uncertainty-driven exploration in real-world consumer choice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(28), 1390313908. 10.1073/pnas.1821028116
  64. 64Schwartenbeck, P., FitzGerald, T. H. B., Mathys, C., Dolan, R., Kronbichler, M., & Friston, K. (2015). Evidence for surprise minimization over value maximization in choice behavior. Scientific Reports, 5(1), Article 1. 10.1038/srep16575
  65. 65Seymour, B., & McClure, S. M. (2008). Anchors, scales and the relative coding of value in the brain. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 18(2), 173178. 10.1016/j.conb.2008.07.010
  66. 66Sharot, T., & Sunstein, C. R. (2020). How people decide what they want to know. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(1), 1419. 10.1038/s41562-019-0793-1
  67. 67Smith, P. L., & Ratcliff, R. (2004). Psychology and neurobiology of simple decisions. Trends in Neurosciences, 27(3), 161168. 10.1016/j.tins.2004.01.006
  68. 68Stephens, D. W., & Krebs, J. R. (1986). Foraging Theory. 10.1515/9780691206790
  69. 69Sternad, D. (2018). It’s not (only) the mean that matters: Variability, noise and exploration in skill learning. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 20, 183195. 10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.01.004
  70. 70Tulloch, A. I. T., Maloney, R. F., Joseph, L. N., Bennett, J. R., Di Fonzo, M. M. I., Probert, W. J. M., O’Connor, S. M., Densem, J. P., & Possingham, H. P. (2015). Effect of risk aversion on prioritizing conservation projects. Conservation Biology, 29(2), 513524. 10.1111/cobi.12386
  71. 71Uddin, L. Q. (2021). Cognitive and behavioural flexibility: Neural mechanisms and clinical considerations. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 22(3), Article 3. 10.1038/s41583-021-00428-w
  72. 72van der Wel, R. P. R. D., Sebanz, N., & Knoblich, G. (2012). The sense of agency during skill learning in individuals and dyads. Consciousness and Cognition, 21(3), 1267–1279. 10.1016/j.concog.2012.04.001
  73. 73Vidal, A., Soto-Faraco, S., & Moreno Bote, R. (2022). Balance between breadth and depth in human many-alternative decisions. eLife, 11. 10.7554/ELIFE.76985
  74. 74von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton University Press.
  75. 75Voss, J. L., Gonsalves, B. D., Federmeier, K. D., Tranel, D., & Cohen, N. J. (2011). Hippocampal brain-network coordination during volitional exploratory behavior enhances learning. Nature Neuroscience, 14(1), Article 1. 10.1038/nn.2693
  76. 76Waschke, L., Kloosterman, N. A., Obleser, J., & Garrett, D. D. (2021). Behavior needs neural variability. Neuron, 109(5), 751766. 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.01.023
  77. 77Weiss, A., Chambon, V., Lee, J. K., Drugowitsch, J., & Wyart, V. (2021). Interacting with volatile environments stabilizes hidden-state inference and its brain signatures. Nature Communications, 12(1), Article 1. 10.1038/s41467-021-22396-6
  78. 78Wilson, R. C., Bonawitz, E., Costa, V. D., & Ebitz, R. B. (2021). Balancing exploration and exploitation with information and randomization. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 38, 4956. 10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.10.001
  79. 79Wilson, R. C., Geana, A., White, J. M., Ludvig, E. A., & Cohen, J. D. (2014). Humans use directed and random exploration to solve the explore-exploit dilemma. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 20742081. 10.1037/A0038199
  80. 80Wu, C. M., Schulz, E., Speekenbrink, M., Nelson, J. D., & Meder, B. (2018). Generalization guides human exploration in vast decision spaces. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(12), Article 12. 10.1038/s41562-018-0467-4
  81. 81Wu, R., Ferguson, A. M., & Inzlicht, M. (2023). Do humans prefer cognitive effort over doing nothing? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(4), 10691079. 10.1037/xge0001320
  82. 82Wyart, V., de Gardelle, V., Scholl, J., & Summerfield, C. (2012). Rhythmic Fluctuations in Evidence Accumulation during Decision Making in the Human Brain. Neuron, 76(4), 847858. 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.09.015
  83. 83Wyart, V., & Koechlin, E. (2016). Choice variability and suboptimality in uncertain environments. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 11, 109115. 10.1016/J.COBEHA.2016.07.003
  84. 84Zelick, P. R. (2007). Issues in the Psychology of Motivation. Nova Publishers. 10.1016/S1351-4180(06)72048-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.467 | Journal eISSN: 2514-4820
Language: English
Submitted on: Mar 5, 2024
Accepted on: Oct 1, 2025
Published on: Nov 18, 2025
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2025 Alice Vidal, Francesco Damiani, Alireza Valyan, Salvador Soto-Faraco, Rubén Moreno-Bote, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.