Empirical research has shown that when making choices based on probabilistic options, people behave as if they overestimate small probabilities, underestimate large probabilities, and treat positive and negative outcomes differently. These distortions have been modeled using a nonlinear probability weighting function, which is found in several…

Learning and executive functions such as task-switching share common neural substrates, notably prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. Understanding how they interact requires studying how cognitive control facilitates learning but also how learning provides the (potentially hidden) structure, such as abstract rules or task-sets, needed for…

Transitivity of preferences is a fundamental principle shared by most major contemporary rational, prescriptive, and descriptive models of decision making. To have transitive preferences, a person, group, or society that prefers choice option "x" to "y" and "y" to "z" must prefer "x" to…

A behavior-based theory identified 2 characteristics of voluntary acts. The first, extensively explored in operant-conditioning experiments, is that voluntary responses produce the reinforcers that control them. This bidirectional relationship--in which reinforcer depends on response and response on reinforcer--demonstrates the functional nature…

It is commonly assumed that people make intertemporal choices by "discounting" the value of delayed outcomes, assigning discounted values independently to all options, and comparing the discounted values. We identify a class of anomalies to this assumption of alternative-based discounting, which collectively shows that options are not treated…

How do people select among different strategies to accomplish a given task? Across disciplines, the strategy selection problem represents a major challenge. We propose a quantitative model that predicts how selection emerges through the interplay among strategies, cognitive capacities, and the environment. This interplay carves out for each…

It is argued that animals, whether nutritionally replete or nutrient deprived, are not particularly adept at selecting a balanced diet when offered a number of alternatives of varying nutritive value and that the data have never actually indicated otherwise in spite of opinions to the contrary. (SLD)

A unified theory of visual recognition and attentional selection is developed by integrating the biased-choice model for single-stimulus recognition with a choice model for selection from multielement displays in a race model framework. The theory is applied to findings from previous studies and quantitative fits are encouraging. (SLD)

This paper is an attempt toward the goal of developing an integrated quantitative theory of visual stimulus selection. (Author/RK)