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Categorical Decisions

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Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience
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Definition

Categorical decision-making is the process of committing to a particular option from a discrete set of alternatives.

Detailed Description

Introduction

Studies of categorical decision-making attempt to understand behavior by probing how different features of complex and changing environments guide the selection of choices. While the parameters underlying these features often span a continuous range, the potential set of possible behavioral options is discrete. The neuroscientific study of decision-making draws heavily on the fields of psychology, economics, statistics, and ecology. Neuroscientific approaches to decision-making aim to reveal computational principles that can be mapped onto their neurobiological implementation.

There are two dominant traditions in neuroscience and psychology to study categorical decisions: perceptual and value-based decision-making. Perceptual decision-making focuses on how accurate decisions are reached by resolving perceptual uncertainty. In...

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Correspondence to Adam Kepecs .

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© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Masset, P., Kepecs, A. (2015). Categorical Decisions. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6675-8_310

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