Healthy choices depend on latency and speed of information accumulation

Sullivan, NJ, Huether, SA Healthy choices depend on latency and speed of information accumulation. Nat Hum Behav (2021) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01154-0

Commentary

This study was an investigation of healthy food choices.

The drift-diffusion model can provide a concise explanation of decisions across neurobiological, psychological, and behavioral levels of analysis. In implementing this model, there is an assumption that only a single value will guide the decision, but the alternatives include multiple attributes that may make a separable contribution to the choice.

In this study, incentive-compatible dietary choices can be fitted to a multi-attribute time-dependent drift-diffusion model, where taste and health may affect the evidence accumulation process differently.

We find that these attributes shaped both the relative value signal and the latency of evidence accumulation in a way that is consistent with the participants' idiosyncratic constitutional preferences. Furthermore, by using dietary primes, we have shown how healthy choice interventions can alter multiple attributes.

Because the time-dependent drift-diffusion model parameters predict prime-dependent choice, these results reveal that different decision attributes make separable contributions to the strength and timing of evidence accumulation, providing new insights into the construction of interventions to change the process of choice.