BACKGROUND Healthcare decisionmaking is a complex process relying on disparate types of evidence and value judgments. Our objectives for this study were to develop a practical framework to facilitate decisionmaking in terms of supporting the deliberative process, providing access to evidence, and enhancing the communication of decisions. METHODS Extensive analyses of the literature and of doc...

Dhaliwal’s comment on Zwaan et al nicely refutes what has been called ‘the hypothesis of special cause’—the notion that when things turn out wrong, the cognitive processes leading to that outcome must have been fundamentally different (ie, error-prone) from when they turn out right. Dhaliwal’s argument recapitulates thinking that is over 100 years old; one of the early contributors to psycholog...

Traditionally, insights into neural computation have been furnished by averaged firing rates from many stimulus repetitions or trials. We pursue an analysis of neural response variance to unveil neural computations that cannot be discerned from measures of average firing rate. We analyzed single-neuron recordings from the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), during a perceptual decision-making tas...

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has recently received increasing attention in functional neuroimaging due to its ability to decode mental states from fMRI signals. However, questions remain regarding both the empirical and conceptual relationships between results from MVPA and standard univariate analyses. In the current study, whole-brain univariate and searchlight MVPAs of parametric man...

The central issue in strategy formulation and implementation process, or strategy-making, is the identification of environmental forces and the preparation of a plan of action to deal with them. This necessitates scanning the environment for gathering information. Environmental scanning should enable the firm to identify these forces. Doing this not only calls for information gathering, but als...

Cyanobacteria blooms are a major environmental issue worldwide. Our understanding of the biophysical processes driving cyanobacterial proliferation and the ability to develop predictive models that inform resource managers and policy makers rely upon the accurate characterization of bloom dynamics. Models quantifying relationships between bloom severity and environmental drivers are often calib...

Food intake is essential for maintaining homeostasis, which is necessary for survival in all species. However, food intake also impacts multiple biochemical processes that influence our behavior. Here, we investigate the causal relationship between macronutrient composition, its bodily biochemical impact, and a modulation of human social decision making. Across two studies, we show that breakfa...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new model for describing the cognitive process of decision making. Being of a generalization of Tversky and Koehler's Support Theory, the proposed model firstly defines the choice probability among several alternatives in terms of degree of "support." Secondly the model defines the degree of support in terms of objective probability and representativene...

The benefits of deliberate, goal-directed thought processes to decision making have been understood for hundreds of years (Descartes, 1637/ 1998; Locke, 1690/1979). The idea that deliberately “thinking things through” is the best way to make a decision is at the basis of both classic (Janis & Mann, 1977; Simon, 1955) and contemporary perspectives on decision making (Bettman, Luce, & Payne, 1998...