Peter Kvam

University of Florida | UF · Department of Psychology

Multiple-choice and continuous-response tasks pose a number of challenges for models of the decision process, from empirical challenges like context effects to computational demands imposed by choice sets with a large number of outcomes. This paper develops a general framework for constructing models of the cognitive processes underlying both infer...

Neurocognitive tasks are frequently used to assess disordered decision making, and cognitive models of these tasks can quantify performance in terms related to decision makers' underlying cognitive processes. In many cases, multiple cognitive models purport to describe similar processes , but it is difficult to evaluate whether they measure the sam...

Theories that describe how people assign prices and make choices are typically based on the idea that both of these responses are derived from a common static, deterministic function used to assign utilities to options. However, preference reversals-where prices assigned to gambles conflict with preference orders elicited through binary choices-ind...

Recently-developed models of decision making have provided accounts of the cognitive processes underlying choice on tasks where responses can fall along a continuum, such as identifying the color or orientation of a stimulus. Even though nearly all of these models seek to extend diffusion decision processes to a continuum of response options, they...

Understanding the cognitive processes underlying choice requires theories that can disentangle the representation of stimuli from the processes that map these representations onto observed responses. We develop a dynamic theory of how stimuli are mapped onto discrete (choice) and onto continuous response scales. It proposes that the mapping from a...

Deep neural networks have recently begun to be used for fitting and comparing cognitive models, yet they have mainly focused on machine learning as a method for dealing with models that lack tractable likelihoods. Evaluating how these approaches compare to traditional likelihood-based methods is critical to determining what role they might play in...

Subjective value and preference for delayed prospects are measured in multiple ways, including both choices between options and price equivalents. However, these methods diverge in their conclusions, resulting in preference reversals that parallel those observed in risky choice. To reconcile these reversals under a common theory of value, we develo...

Dynamic models of choice typically describe the decision-making process in terms of the degree or balance of support for available response options. However, these alternative-specific representations of support are liable to fail when the available options change during the course of a decision. We suggest that people may use alternative-general r...

Theories of dynamic decision-making are typically built on evidence accumulation, which is modeled using racing accumulators or diffusion models that track a shifting balance of support over time. However, these two types of models are only two special cases of a more general evidence accumulation process where options correspond to directions in a...

Depression and anxiety symptoms are on the rise among adolescents. With increasing evidence that cellular aging may be associated with depressive and anxiety symptoms, there is an urgent need to identify the social environment context that may moderate this link. This study addresses this research gap by investigating the moderating role of the soc...

Theories of decision making are implemented in models that predict and explain behavior in terms of latent cognitive processes. But where do these models come from, and how are they instantiated in the brain? In this paper, we examine several avenues where artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can benefit decision theory by providi...

Subjective value has long been measured using binary choice experiments, yet responses like willingness-to-pay prices can be an effective and efficient way to assess individual differences risk preferences and value. Tony Marley's work illustrated that dynamic, stochastic models permit meaningful inferences about cognition from process-level data o...

The Implicit Association Test (IAT), like many behavioral measures, seeks to quantify meaningful individual differences in cognitive processes that are difficult to assess with approaches like self-reports. However, much like other behavioral measures, many IATs appear to show low test-retest reliability and typical scoring methods fail to quantify...

When making decisions based on probabilistic outcomes, people guide their behavior using knowledge gathered through both indirect descriptions and direct experience. Paradoxically, how people obtain information significantly impacts apparent preferences. A ubiquitous example is the description-experience gap: individuals seemingly overweight low pr...

People are often biased in how they evaluate characteristics of individuals of different races. Some of these biases are perceptual: for example, the “race-lightness effect” demonstrates that for grayscale photos at equivalent luminance values, the faces of black individuals are frequently judged to be darker than the faces of white individuals. Ot...

When making decisions based on probabilistic outcomes, people guide their behavior using knowledge gathered through both indirect descriptions and direct experience. Paradoxically, how people obtain information significantly impacts apparent preferences. A ubiquitous example is the description-experience gap: individuals seemingly overweight low pr...

Subjective value has long been measured using binary choice experiments, yet responses like willingness-to-pay prices can be an effective and efficient way to assess individual differences risk preferences and value. Tony Marley's work illustrated that dynamic, stochastic models permit meaningful inferences about cognition from process-level data o...

Polarization and extremism are often viewed as the product of psychological biases or social influences, yet they still occur in the absence of any bias or irrational thinking. We show that individual decision-makers implementing optimal dynamic decision strategies will become polarized, forming extreme views relative to the true information in the...

People discount both future outcomes that could happen and past outcomes that could have happened according to how far away they are in time. A common finding is that future outcomes are often preferred to past ones when the payoffs and temporal distance (how long ago / until they occur) are matched, referred to as temporal value asymmetry. In this...

The Implicit Association Test [IAT], like many behavioral measures, seeks to quantify meaningful individual differences in cognitive processes that are difficult to assess with approaches like self-reports. However, much like other behavioral measures, the IAT appears to show low test-retest reliability and typical scoring methods fail to quantify...

Understanding the cognitive processes underlying choice requires theories that can disentangle the representation of stimuli from the processes that map these representations onto observed responses. We develop a dynamic theory of how stimuli are mapped onto discrete (choice) and continuous response scales. It proposes that the mapping from stimuli...

Sequential sampling models have provided accurate accounts of people’s choice, response time, and preference strength in value-based decision-making tasks. Conventionally, these models are developed as Markov-type processes (such as random walks or diffusion processes) following the Kolmogorov axioms. Quantum probability theory has been proposed as...

Responding to stimuli in a timely manner and anticipating the timing of future events both require us to internally track the passage of time. Models of timing on these tasks suggest that the subjective passage of time can be described as a noisy accumulation process driven by neural oscillations. In this paper, we show that the accuracy of these a...

Preference reversals in risky choice -- where people favor low-risk prospects in binary choice but assign higher prices to high-risk prospects -- have led to models of response processes that differentiate pricing from choice. Theories of intertemporal choice do not distinguish between response processes, assuming instead that eliciting choices or...

Preference reversals in risky choice -- where people favor low-risk prospects in binary choice but assign higher prices to high-risk prospects -- have led to models of response processes that differentiate pricing from choice. Theories of intertemporal choice do not distinguish between response processes, assuming instead that eliciting choices or...

The decisions we make in our everyday lives often require us to navigate through a barrage of information, so that we can base our decisions only on information that is relevant to our goals. Selectively attending only to goal-relevant dimensions of information can help us efficiently navigate this barrage of information, but can also lead us into...

Preference reversals in risky choice -- where people favor low-risk prospects in binary choice but assign higher prices to high-risk prospects -- have led to models of response processes that differentiate pricing from choice. Theories of intertemporal choice do not distinguish between response processes, assuming instead that eliciting choices or...

The decision process is often conceptualized as a constructive process in which a decision maker accumulates information to form preferences about the choice options and ultimately make a response. Here we examine how these constructive processes unfold by tracking dynamic changes in preference strength. Across two experiments, we observed that mea...

People discount both future outcomes that could happen and past outcomes that could have happened according to how far away they are in time. A common finding is that future outcomes are often preferred to past ones when the payoffs and temporal distance (how long ago / until they occur) are matched, referred to as temporal value asymmetry. In this...

Polarization is often described as the product of biased information search, motivated reasoning, or other psychological biases. However, polarization and extremism can still occur in the absence of any bias or irrational thinking. In this paper, we show that polarization occurs among groups of decision makers who are implementing rational choice s...

Recently-developed models of decision making have provided accounts of the cognitive processes underlying choice on tasks where responses can fall along a continuum, such as identifying the color or orientation of a stimulus. Even though nearly all of these models seek to extend diffusion decision processes to a continuum of response options, they...

Polarization is often thought to be the product of biased information search, motivated reasoning , or other psychological biases. However, polarization and extremism can still occur in the absence of any bias or irrational thinking. In this paper, we show that polarization occurs among groups of decision makers who are implementing rational choice...

Behavioral tasks (e.g., Stroop task) that produce replicable group-level effects (e.g., Stroop effect) often fail to reliably capture individual differences between participants (e.g., low test-retest reliability). This “reliability paradox” has led many researchers to conclude that most behavioral tasks cannot be used to develop and advance theori...

We propose a dynamic theory of decisions not to choose which of two options is correct. Such “don’t-know” judgements are of theoretical and practical importance in domains ranging from comparative psychology, psychophysics, episodic memory and metacognition to applied areas including educational testing and eyewitness testimony. However, no previou...

Many models of response time that base choices on the first evidence accumulator to win a race to threshold rely on statistical independence between accumulators to achieve mathematical tractability (e.g., Brown and Heathcote, 2008; Logan et al., 2014; Van Zandt et al., 2000). However, it is psychologically plausible that trial-to-trial fluctuation...

Contemporary theories of choice posit that decision making is a constructive process in which a decision maker uses information about the choice options to generate support for various decisions and judgments, then uses these decisions and judgments to reduce their uncertainty about their own preferences. Here we examine how these constructive proc...

Delay discounting behavior has proven useful in assessing impulsivity across a wide range of populations. As such, accurate estimation of the shape of each individual's temporal discounting profile is paramount when drawing conclusions about how impulsivity relates to clinical and health outcomes such as gambling, addiction, and obesity. Here, we i...

Theories that describe how people assign prices and make choices are typically based on the idea that both of these responses are derived from a common static, deterministic function used to assign utilities to options. However, preference reversals -- where prices assigned to gambles conflict with preference orders elicited through binary choices...

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data f...

What kind of dynamic decision process do humans use to make decisions? In this article, two different types of processes are reviewed and compared: Markov and quantum. Markov processes are based on the idea that at any given point in time a decision maker has a definite and specific level of support for available choice alternatives, and the dynami...

What kind of dynamic decision process do humans use to make decisions? In this article, two different types of processes are reviewed and compared: Markov and quantum. Markov processes are based on the idea that at any given point in time a decision maker has a definite and specific level of support for available choice alternatives, and the dynami...

What kind of dynamic decision process do humans use to make decisions? In this article, two different types of processes are reviewed and compared: Markov and quantum. Markov processes are based on the idea that at any given point in time a decision maker has a definite and specific level of support for available choice alternatives, and the dynami...

Two different dynamic models for belief change during evidence monitoring were evaluated: Markov and quantum. They were empirically tested with an experiment in which participants monitored evidence for an initial period of time, made a probability rating, then monitored more evidence, before making a second rating. The models were qualitatively te...

Many models of response time that base choices on the first evidence accumulator to win a race to threshold rely on statistical independence between accumulators to achieve mathematical tractability (e.g., Brown & Heathcote, 2008; Logan et al., 2014; Van Zandt et al., 2000). However, it is psychologically plausible that trial-to-trial fluctuations ca...

We propose a dynamic theory of decisions not to choose between two options. Such “don’t-know” judgements are of theoretical and practical importance in domains ranging from comparative psychology, psychophysics, episodic memory and metacognition to applied areas including educational testing and eyewitness testimony. However, no previous theory has...

An examination of the cognitive tools that the mind uses to grapple with uncertainty in the real world. How do humans navigate uncertainty, continuously making near-effortless decisions and predictions even under conditions of imperfect knowledge, high complexity, and extreme time pressure? Taming Uncertainty argues that the human mind has develope...

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. However, progress has been slowed by the difficulty of collecting new data and the unavailability of existing data. To address this issue, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broa...

Neurocognitive tasks are frequently used to assess disordered decision making, and cognitive models of these tasks can quantify performance in terms related to decision makers' underlying cognitive processes. In many cases, multiple cognitive models purport to describe similar processes, but it is difficult to evaluate whether they measure the same...

Two different dynamic models for belief change during evidence monitoring were evaluated: Markov and quantum. They were empirically tested with an experiment in which participants monitored evidence for an initial period of time, made a probability rating, then monitored more evidence, before making a second rating. The models were qualitatively te...

Despite the prevalence of real-world and laboratory tasks where people select among many options , cognitive models have traditionally focused on choices among small sets of alternatives. This has resulted in theoretical and empirical gaps in understanding the decision processes that go into selections among many alternatives or responses that fall...

Despite the prevalence of real-world and laboratory tasks where people select among many options, cognitive models have traditionally focused on choices among small sets of alternatives. This has resulted in theoretical and empirical gaps in understanding the decision processes that go into selections among many alternatives or responses that fall...

Most models of pricing embody a static, deterministic theory of value where the monetary amount people assign to an item is computed as a fixed function of its attributes. Preference reversals --- where prices assigned to gambles conflict with preference orders elicited through binary choices -- indicate that the response processes going into value...

Most models of pricing embody a static, deterministic theory of value where the monetary amount people assign to an item is computed as a fixed function of its attributes. Preference reversals where prices assigned to gambles conflict with preference orders elicited through binary choices-indicate that the response processes going into value assess...

Multiple-choice and continuous-response tasks pose a number of challenges for models of the decision process, from empirical challenges like context effects to computational demands imposed by choice sets with a large number of outcomes. In this paper, I propose a general framework for constructing models of the decision process that represents cho...

This chapter outlines the justification for a quantum probability approach to modeling cognitive and decision processes. It cover the technical details of Hilbert spaces, linear operators and subspaces, basis vectors, unitary operators, eigenvectors and eigenvalues, tensor product spaces, differences between quantum and classical probability theori...

Theories of decision-making often posit optimal or heuristic strategies for performing a task. In optimal strategies, information is integrated over time in order to achieve the ideal outcomes; in the heuristic case, some shortcut or simplification is applied in order to make the decision faster or easier. In this paper, we use a computational fram...

Markov Brains are a class of evolvable artificial neural networks (ANN). They differ from conventional ANNs in many aspects, but the key difference is that instead of a layered architecture, with each node performing the same function, Markov Brains are networks built from individual computational components. These computational components interact...

Quantum probability theory has been successfully applied outside of physics to account for numerous findings from psychology regarding human judgement and decision making behavior. However, the researchers who have made these applications do not rely on the hypothesis that the brain is some type of quantum computer. This raises the question of how...

Cues indicating the state of the world play a critical role in decision-making in both inferential and preferential tasks, and are the focus of many heuristic models of cognitive processes. In this paper, we present the formal logical structure that is presupposed in a specific class of these processes: fast and frugal heuristics. We review the str...

Traditionally, models of the decision-making process have focused on the case where a decision-maker must choose between two alternatives. The most successful of these, sequential sampling models, have been extended from the binary case to account for choices and response times between multiple alternatives. In this paper, I present a geometric rep...

Evidence for different hypotheses is often treated as a singular construct, but it can be dissociated into two parts: its strength, the proportion of pieces of information favoring one hypothesis; and its weight, the total number of pieces of information available. However, cognitive and neural models of evidence accumulation often make a proportio...

Significance Most cognitive and neural decision-making models—owing to their roots in classical probability theory—assume that decisions are read out of a definite state of accumulated evidence. This assumption contradicts the view held by many behavioral scientists that decisions construct rather than reveal beliefs and preferences. We present a q...

Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for studying strategy development based on computational evolution that takes the opposite approach, allowing strat...

Introduction: Condom-associated erection problems (CAEPs) are reported by a substantial number of young men and are associated with inconsistent and/or incomplete condom use. The underlying mechanisms of CAEP are not well understood, and research examining the possibility that men who report CAEP differ from other men in their sexual responsivity...

In this paper, we test the type indeterminacy hypothesis by analyzing an experiment that examines the stability of preferences in a Prisoner Dilemma with respect to decisions made in a context that is both payoff and informationally unrelated to that Prisoner Dilemma. More precisely we carried out an experiment in which participants were permitted...

In this paper, we examine the effect of making a choice on subsequent confidence. Using a simple binary forced-choice perceptual task, we show that committing to a decision results in perturbed probability (confidence) judgments compared to a control condition where no decision is elicited, suggesting that committing to a decision interferes with s...

Investigating the ways in which barrier methods such as condoms may affect penile sensory thresholds has potential relevance to the development of interventions in men who experience negative effects of condoms on sexual response and sensation. A quantitative, psychophysiological investigation examining the degree to which sensations are altered by...

Quantum probability (QP) provides a new perspective for cognitive science. However, one must be clear about the outcome the QP model is predicting. We discuss this concern in reference to modeling the subjective probabilities given by people as opposed to modeling the choice proportions of people. These two models would appear to have different cog...