{
  "id": 3351244,
  "title": "Deciding when to decide: How recency, urgency, risk, and bias shape human sequential decision-making: A case study across the obsessive-compulsive spectrum",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/25/deciding-when-to-decide-how-recency-urgency-risk-and-bias-shape-human",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "bioRxiv",
    "slug": "biorxiv",
    "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.21.746184v1?rss=1"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Deciding when to stop seeking information and commit to a choice is a crucial challenge in decision-making when faced with uncertainty. Although normative theories like Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide mathematically optimal stopping rules, humans often deviate from these ideals. Investigating the cognitive mechanisms behind these deviations can provide insights into disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). To explore this, researchers extended a POMDP framework to account for several potential suboptimalities, including biased prior beliefs, temporary exaggeration of evidence, progressive forgetting, increased error costs, temporal regulation (patience and urgency), and misperception of a deadline. By analyzing a dataset of 105 participants, including healthy controls, individuals with generalized anxiety disorder, and those on the OCD spectrum, the model comparison showed that human sequential choices are primarily influenced by subjective risk penalties and time-dependent urgency. The contribution from an overemphasis on recent evidence was smaller and less certain, and its impact varied significantly among individuals. In one scenario, participants alternated between models that either temporarily overvalued the most recent information, gradually forgot older information, or ignored recency altogether. While risk sensitivity and variability in choices were consistent across conditions, factors like belief bias and patience differed more. When focusing on OCD, simulating choices based on the exaggeration model accurately replicated clinical indecision patterns observed in the data, something the forgetting and no-recency models could not achieve. These results provide a theoretical basis for understanding how clinical differences in information gathering manifest across the obsessive-compulsive spectrum.",
  "summary": "Deciding when to stop gathering information and commit to a choice is a fundamental challenge in decision-making under uncertainty. Normative characterizations such as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) prescribe mathematically optimal stopping rules; however, human evidence gathering systematically departs from optimality. Pathological departures -- such as the excessive…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}