Continual decision-making dynamics across biological organisms

Decision-making is a central function of adaptive behaviour in biological agents. However, strategies for adaptive decision-making can vary substantially across species. Here, we aim to extend the comparative scope of decision-making analyses to phylogenetically diverse organisms. To do so, we introduce the Continual Decision Making Dynamics (CDMD) framework, which characterises decision-making as a temporally extended, history-sensitive process that is sustained by self-organising and self-regulating interactions. Drawing on empirical examples, we demonstrate how CDMD can accommodate the organisation of control architectures that support more distributed and decentralised modes of decision-making, and facilitate a comparative approach to decision-making strategies across phylogenetic and organisational scales. We discuss how our model can be situated among other related approaches to decision-making, capturing a distinctive subset of decision strategies that can be modelled in the absence of explicit representational structures. Our framework contributes to integrative approaches that bridge biological complexity and cognitive modelling, and highlights how regulatory control and organisational constraints shape decision-making dynamics across a broader range of biological systems.