Biases and optimality of sensory-motor and cognitive decisions

I review a variety of behavioral studies directed at understanding how probability and value information is represented in motor and cognitive tasks. Subjects in (cognitive) decision-making tasks often misrepresent the frequency of rare events and typically fail to maximize expected gain. In contrast, subjects in mathematically equivalent movement tasks are generally found to be very good at choosing motor strategies that come close to maximizing expected gain. I discuss the differences between the sources of uncertainty for decisions in the motor and cognitive domain and summarize experimental evidence about how information about uncertainty is acquired in motor and cognitive decision tasks. Finally, I briefly review the evidence concerning the neural coding of probability, expected gain, and other information in decision-making tasks.