Decision Making by Ensembles of Accumulators

Evidence accumulation is a computational framework that accounts for behavior as well as the dynamics of individual neurons involved in decision making. Linking these two levels of description reveals a scaling paradox: How do choices and response times (RT) explained by models assuming single accumulators arise from a large ensemble of idiosyncratic accumulator neurons? We created a simulation model that makes decisions by aggregating across ensembles of accumulators, thereby instantiating the essential structure of neural ensembles that make decisions. Across different levels of simulated choice difficulty and speed-accuracy emphasis, choice proportions and RT distributions simulated by the ensembles are invariant to ensemble size and the accumulated evidence at RT is invariant across RT when the accumulators are at least moderately correlated in either baseline evidence or rates of accumulation and when RT is not governed by the most extreme accumulators. To explore the relationship between the low-level ensemble accumulators and high-level cognitive models, we fit simulated ensemble behavior with a standard LBA model. The standard LBA model generally recovered the core accumulator parameters (particularly drift rates and residual time) of individual ensemble accumulators with high accuracy, with variability parameters of the standard LBA modulating as a function of various ensemble parameters. Ensembles of accumulators also provide an alternative conception of speed-accuracy tradeoff without relying on varying thresholds of individual accumulators, instead by adjusting how ensembles of accumulators are aggregated or by how accumulators are correlated within ensembles. These results clarify relationships between neural and computational accounts of decision making.