Toward a more integrated understanding of impulsivity: response vigor in decision-making

Impulsivity is a multifaceted concept that has been related to important life outcomes in various domains of behavior. It broadly refers to a predisposition to act rapidly and prematurely without sufficient consideration of information, and contains components of both decision and action. The tendency to decide without sufficient information (reflection impulsivity) and the tendency to act rapidly (action impulsivity) are often considered to be independent and hence mostly studied in isolation. However, recent advances in the fields of decision-making and motor control suggest that the two may be closely interrelated. The current project will therefore investigate the interrelation between reflection impulsivity and action impulsivity. I aim to answer three main outstanding questions: how response vigor varies as a function of decision variables throughout the whole process of decision-making, how the costs and benefits in a choice context influence both decision and action simultaneously, and whether individuals can learn to adopt certain decision and action tendencies from a choice context. Together, these three interrelated work packages will offer a more integrated understanding of impulsivity, both when it manifests in how individuals sample information and decide, and how vigorously they act to express their decisions.