Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

When making decisions, humans are often distracted by irrelevant information. Distraction has a different impact on perceptual, cognitive, and value-guided choices, giving rise to well-described behavioral phenomena such as the tilt illusion, conflict adaptation, or economic decoy effects. However, a single, unified model that can account for all these phenomena has yet to emerge. Here, we offer one such account, based on adaptive gain control, and additionally show that it successfully predicts a range of counterintuitive new behavioral phenomena on variants of a classic cognitive paradigm, the Eriksen flanker task. We also report that blood oxygen level-dependent signals in a dorsal network prominently including the anterior cingulate cortex index a gain-modulated decision variable predicted by the model. This work unifies the study of distraction across perceptual, cognitive, and economic domains.

Original publication

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1805224115

Type

Journal article

Journal

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Publication Date

18/09/2018

Volume

115

Pages

E8825 - E8834

Keywords

anterior cingulate cortex, cognitive control, decoy effects, gain control, tilt illusion, Attention, Brain Mapping, Cognition, Computer Simulation, Decision Making, Feedback, Sensory, Functional Neuroimaging, Gyrus Cinguli, Healthy Volunteers, Humans, Models, Neurological, Oxygen