abstract
- Indecisive behaviour can be catastrophic, leading to car crashes or stock market losses. Despite fruitful efforts across several decades to understand decision-making, there has been little research on what leads to indecision. Here we examined how indecisions arise under high-pressure deadlines. In our first experiment participants attempted to select a target by either reacting to a stimulus or guessing, when acting under a high pressure time constraint. We found that participants were suboptimal, displaying a below chance win percentage due to an excessive number of indecisions. Computational modelling suggested that participants were excessively indecisive because they failed to account for a time delay and temporal uncertainty when switching from reacting to guessing, a phenomenon previously unreported in the literature. In a follow-up experiment we pro- vide direct evidence for a functionally relevant time delay and temporal uncertainty when switching from reacting to guessing. Collectively, our results indicate that participants failed to account for a time delay and temporal uncertainty associated with switching from reacting to guessing, leading to suboptimal and indecisive behaviour.