< Back to Article
An Extra Dimension to Decision-Making in Animals: The Three-way Trade-off between Speed, Effort per-Unit-Time and Accuracy
Figure 2
Comparison of individuals with and without the ability to modulate effort.
Type 1 (red bars) can vary its level of effort (which it controls through the parameter 
) whereas type 2 (blue bars) cannot do so (it has a fixed value of 
). Type 2 has the value of 
optimal for one particular value of the cost of time; in our example this is 
. A Both types have the same performance under baseline regime of 
, but when 
increases or decreases, type 1 makes a greater proportion of correct decisions than type 2. B If 
decreases, type 1 increases its decision time (
) to a greater extent than type 2, and if 
increases, it reduces its decision time to a lower level than the type 2. These results are from a very large number of simulations, so the error bars on these values are vanishingly small and all differences are significant. Other parameter levels: 
, 
, 
, 
, 
(see Methods for details and calculations).
doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003937.g002