Phantom controllers: Misspecified models create the false appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice

Abstract

Decision scientists have grown increasingly interested in how people adaptively control their decision making, exploring how metacognitive factors like uncertainty or conflict influence how people accumulate evidence and commit to a choice. For example, a recent study proposed that options values contribute to both the formation of a decision and the effortful invigoration of a response. Here, the control process was operationalized in a drift diffusion model as the lowering of the decision threshold on difficult trials. Reanalyzing the data from this experiment, we establish alternative explanations for these findings. We show that the reported evidence for controlled threshold adjustments can be explained away by task confounds, time-dependent collapses in decision thresholds, and stimulus-driven dynamics in alternative decision frameworks. With regard to the individual study, our findings challenge the reported evidence for this new theory of motivated control. More generally, we reveal paths and pitfalls in computational approaches to understanding when and how control guides decision-making.