New paper, "Continuous Decisions" in PTRSB w/ @neuromochi and @jmxpearson. We argue that the neuroscience of decision-making is too narrowly focused on a very particular subtype - choices with small numbers of options (often two) at a single point in time.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0664

We argue that while (what we call) discrete decisions are important, they are a small subset of the broader class of continuous decisions that involve many options (often an infinitude) and that extend over a long period of time.

Our favorite example is prey-pursuit decisions: a predator who is pursuing a prey must select from a wide array of possible directions of motion and must do so at every moment until capture or giving up.

(The decision-maker must ALSO make higher-level decisions - which prey, when to give up, etc - but both higher-level and lower-level decisions are types of choices and both are important and must be solved at the same time. Real world decisions are complicated!)

Prey-pursuit is a fascinating problem and has been largely ignored in neuroscience for reasons we cannot guess! But it has a lot of convenient features for neuroscience.

We argue that many of the findings from discrete decisions won't generalize, that microeconomic theory is likely a poor foundation, and engineering control theory is likely a better one. (It also integrates notions of control into choice, which which is a nice bonus).

We argue that simulation, mapping, and model-building are likely much more important in continuous decisions than in discrete decisions. And in continuous decisions, value is not nearly as important for understanding behavior as are concepts like goal states and policies.

We are NOT the first people to think about these issues. There's a strong literature (we cite some). But most is in the motor field, and has had surprisingly little influence on the choice/reward/executive control literature. One goal with this paper is to break down that wall.

Finally, we sort through how our ideas were inspired by our own struggles to understand continuous decisions - both prey-pursuit, and strategic - and to use what we know about decision-making to understand them.
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-019-0561-6
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09789-4

Anyway, this is part of a special issue of PTRSB on decision-making edited by Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, @AddessiElsa, and Thomas Boraud. We thank them for letting us take a high-concept approach to the topic. All the articles in it are excellent!
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2021/376/1819

Link to article:
PDF: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2019.0664
HTML: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2019.0664