Risk-Seeking in a Continuous Game of Timing

Continuous games of timing represent an ecologically relevant case of decision-making under uncertainty with many applications to tactical security scenarios. We present two experiments collecting data using the two-player, 20-second FlipIt game, in which a player has to react to an estimated, externally controlled quantity in light of a continuous payoff distribution. The quantity is represented once as time interval, and once as distance in time and space. Risk-taking propensity is an individual parameter obtained via a standardized survey instrument. We find that risk propensity affects participants’ decisions in early and late rounds of the game and show that risk-seeking individuals fail to play well initially in the difficult, time-interval estimation task, but that they can be trained to make rational choices. Participants’ biases are gaussiandistributed. They do not reflect the distribution of payoffs or expected utility. We present an ACT-R model using established error distributions for temporal and visual perception and instance-based learning.