Impulsivity in decision making: investigating the relationship between inhibitory control and rational decision-making in different contexts and modalities

Impulsivity plays an important role in healthy behaviour, but it can also be dysfunctional and has been linked to mania, substance abuse, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, pathological gambling, and eating-disorders (e.g., De Wit, 2009; Evenden, 1999; Moller et al., 2001, Verdejo, Lawrence, & Clark, 2008). One key question is precisely how impulsivity contributes to these behaviours, and to decision-making more widely.

There is some evidence to suggest an overlap between the mechanisms involved in inhibitory control and decision-making. Verbruggen, Adams and Chambers (2012) have shown that training healthy people to exercise motor cautiousness by inhibiting prepotent responses in a stop signal task (SST) can generalise to increased cautiousness on a gambling-style task (see also Stevens et al., 2015). Recent evidence suggests that this transfer of cautiousness can extend beyond the laboratory to affect change to real-world behaviours such as over-eating (Lawrence et al., 2015).

This project will investigate the relationship between inhibitory control and rational decision-making in different contexts and modalities. In particular, we will examine the extent to which the effects of priming (or depleting) inhibitory control generalise to modulate different kinds of decision-making behaviour. A range of decision-making paradigms are available which are formally equivalent to the gambling-style tasks used by Verbruggen et al. but involve very different types of processing, e.g., purely perceptual decisions (Warren, Graf, Maloney, & Champion, 2012), perceptuo-motor decisions (Trommershäuser, Maloney & Landy, 2008) and higher level cognitive decisions (Jarvstad, Hahn, Warren, & Rushton, 2013).

This project has the potential to reveal deep insight into impulsivity and decision making in a range of contexts. Furthermore, establishing a generalised effect of inhibitory control on decision making across tasks would be a powerful result with potential to inform design of optimised training schedules to bring about behaviour change across contexts.

The successful applicant will be trained in a wide range of research skills including experiment design and programming (e.g. Matlab, Presentation, Python), psychophysical methods, eye-tracking (Eyelink 1000), and advanced data analysis (e.g., Matlab and R). There are also regular opportunities to become involved in other activities such as teaching and public engagement events