A unified theory of distraction in human perceptual, cognitive and economic decision-making

When making decisions, humans are often distracted by irrelevant information. Distraction has different impact on perceptual, cognitive and value-guided choices, giving rise to well-described behavioural phenomena such as the tilt illusion, conflict adaptation, or economic decoy effects. However, a single, unified model that can account for all these phenomena has yet to emerge. Here, we offer one such account, based on adaptive gain control, and additionally show that it successfully predicts a range of counterintuitive new behavioural phenomena on variants of a classic cognitive paradigm, the Eriksen flanker task. We also report that BOLD signals in a dorsal network prominently including the anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), index a gain-modulated decision variable predicted by the model. This work unifies the study of distraction across perceptual, cognitive and economic domains.