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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 19, 2026

Online Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of Dorsomedial and Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Cognition Decision Making, and Cognitive Dissonance

Online Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of Dorsomedial and Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Cognition Decision Making, and Cognitive Dissonance

Published on: December 5, 2025

A multiple-choice task with changes of mind.

Larissa Albantakis¹, Francesca M Branzi, Albert Costa

¹Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. albantakis@wisc.edu

|August 24, 2012

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Changes of mind in perceptual decision-making were studied using 2- and 4-choice tasks. While accuracy improved with fewer choices, mind-changing benefited performance across tasks, especially at intermediate difficulty.

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Task Interruption and Resumption Paradigm for Testing the Activation and Pursuit of an Abstract Thinking Goal

Published on: April 18, 2017

Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Perceptual Decision-Making
Human Behavior

Background:

Perceptual decision-making research increasingly examines changes of mind and multiple choice alternatives.
Previous studies often investigated these factors independently, limiting a comprehensive understanding.
The relationship between the number of choice alternatives and the dynamics of mind changes remained unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how the number of choice alternatives influences changes of mind during perceptual decision-making.
To compare behavioral responses and decision dynamics in 2-alternative versus 4-alternative tasks.
To evaluate the impact of mind changes on performance across different task difficulties and choice set sizes.

Main Methods:

Conducted a direction-discrimination task with 14 human participants using both 2 and 4 choice alternatives.
Analyzed movement trajectories to identify and quantify changes of mind.
Utilized a multi-alternative attractor model and a race model to interpret decision-making processes.

Main Results:

Participants exhibited changes of mind in both 2- and 4-alternative tasks.
Faster and more accurate responses were observed with fewer choice alternatives.
The frequency of mind changes did not differ significantly between task conditions, but improved final performance, particularly at intermediate difficulty levels.

Conclusions:

Mind changes enhance decision performance, irrespective of the number of alternatives, especially under intermediate task difficulty.
Individual reaction times correlate negatively with the propensity to change one's mind.
A multi-alternative attractor model successfully explains the observed data, highlighting inhibitory interactions between neural choice representations.