Decision Making Test
Reveal what you need from a covered board, choose among four options, and stop the clock by committing to an answer.
Settings
Changing one restarts the attempt, and scores set under different settings are not comparable.
Quick start
- 1Press Play now. Four options appear, with every fact on them covered.
- 2Read the rule above the board. It says exactly which option wins.
- 3Press a question mark to uncover one fact. Open as many as you want.
- 4Press Take on the option you have settled on, or press 1 to 4.
- 5Read the working, then carry on. The clock stops while you read it.
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Why there is no comparison
Net decisions per minute (decisions/min). Higher is better. No published distribution exists for this task.
Every other test here draws your score on a bar of published results. This one cannot. Nobody has measured enough people on this task to say what a typical result is, so a bar here would be a picture of a number we made up.
Numbers for this task do circulate. The ones we could find name no study and do not agree with each other. We would rather show you nothing than repeat one of those.
No published distribution, and not CognitiveDrill data either. Nobody has measured this task on a large enough sample to say what a typical result is, so this page shows your number and does not rank it. Our own norm is published once a cohort reaches n = 1,000.
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About this test
Why the facts start face down
A table with every figure on it is something to read. A table you have to uncover is something to decide about, and the difference is what this page is for.
John Payne ran this task in 1976 as a board of index cards lying face down. People turned over the cards they wanted, and he recorded which ones and in what order.
The finding that made the method worth keeping was that the turning changed with the job. Give somebody four options and they compare them fact by fact. Give them twelve and they start throwing options out on one fact alone.
So the board here is the measuring instrument, not the decoration. Every fact you open costs you a second or two, and every fact you skip is a risk you took.
Nothing is hidden that you cannot see. Press the question mark and the number is there. The cost is only ever time.
Three rules, and how much of the board each one needs
The rule sits above the board in one sentence, and it is arithmetic rather than taste. There is one right option and the page prints the working afterwards.
The three rules are the ones the research keeps finding people use. Each needs a different amount of the board open before it is settled, and that is the whole reason there are three.
The first is a bar and then a best. Rule out anything over a price, then take the largest of what is left. You have to see the price on all four, and then one more fact on the survivors.
The second is two bars, and exactly one option clears both. You can settle this one having opened five cells, if you open the right five.
The third has no bar. One option leads on two facts out of three, and finding it means seeing eight cells whichever way you go about it.
- One bar, then the best of the rest. Cheapest that is big enough.
- Two bars, and only one option clears both of them.
- No bar at all. The winner leads on two of the three facts.
The subtraction that stops guessing from paying
A rate is the one shape of number that rewards not thinking. Four options means a blind press is right one time in four, and a blind press takes half a second.
So a run of pure guessing would finish in seconds and land a quarter of the boards. Divide that by the time it took and the number would beat anybody who actually read the board.
The fix is old and it is the one exam boards use. Each wrong choice takes a third of a right one off the total. A third is what the three wrong options are worth to a guesser.
Random pressing then earns about zero, and the page holds the number at zero rather than showing you a negative. Everything above zero is work you did.
The rest is a rate correct score, which is the standard way of holding speed and accuracy in one figure. The clock runs only while a board is open, so reading the working is free.
Speed, risk, and what this board leaves out
People arrive at a decision speed test looking for how quickly they can call something. That is half of this number and only half, because a fast wrong call moves it the other way.
If you want the other half on its own, the choice reaction time test is the page for it. There the answer is obvious and the only question is how fast your hand is.
A risk decision test is a different machine again, and this is not one. Nothing here is a gamble: every fact on the board is exact, and the right option is the right option.
Real decisions are mostly not like that. They have odds on them, they have facts nobody has, and the rule is rarely written down. This page measures the part that can be marked.
Speed of this kind does drift with age, which the figures on how processing speed changes with age set out for a simpler task.
There is no curve under this number yet
Your result has no percentile beside it, because no published distribution exists for it and one will not be invented here.
The information board studies are forty years of watching which cells people open. They report search patterns rather than throughput, and their boards differ in size and rule from board to board.
A rate from a six by four board of gambles says nothing about a four by three board with a stated rule. Reshaping one to fit would be a made-up figure wearing a real citation.
So the page reports your number and offers your own earlier runs as the comparison. That is the only fair one it has.
Our own norm goes up when a thousand runs have been collected here, and not one run sooner.
What a high number here does not mean
It means you applied a written rule to a small board quickly and got it right. It does not mean you make good decisions.
Nothing on this page measures judgement under uncertainty, decisions that matter, or decisions you have to live with. Those have no marking scheme.
Getting quicker at these boards is getting quicker at these boards. That is what researchers call near transfer, and whether brain training games are worth it covers what happened when the wider claims were tested.
The number also moves with practice, because the rules repeat. Your first run is the one worth keeping.
Questions
What is a decision making test?
Any task that gives you options, some facts about them and a way of telling which choice was better. This one states the rule, so every board has one right answer.
What is a good score on this test?
Nobody has published a distribution for this task, so the page will not tell you. It reports your rate and leaves the ranking alone until we have collected enough runs.
Is this a decision speed test?
Half of it. Speed is the denominator. A wrong pick takes a third of a right one off the top, so pressing faster on its own lowers the number.
Is this a risk decision test?
No. Nothing here is a gamble and no fact on the board is uncertain. A risk task would give you odds and a payoff, and this one gives you numbers and a rule.
Does opening more facts hurt my score?
Only through the clock. Opening a fact takes a second or two, and skipping one you needed is how a board gets answered wrong. There is no penalty for looking.
How is this different from a choice reaction time test?
There the right answer is obvious and the measurement is your hand. Here the answer takes work, nothing is timed out, and the number is decisions rather than milliseconds.
What does the unproved figure on the result card mean?
It counts the boards you committed to before everything the rule reads was showing. Those choices can still be right. They were guesses that came off.
Can I take it more than once?
Yes. The options and figures are drawn fresh every run, so a second attempt is not the first one again. Your best is kept on this device.
Sources
- Payne JW (1976). Task complexity and contingent processing in decision making: an information search and protocol analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 366-387. Link
- Payne JW, Bettman JR, Johnson EJ (1988). Adaptive strategy selection in decision making. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14(3), 534-552. Link
- Vandierendonck A (2017). A comparison of methods to combine speed and accuracy measures of performance: a rejoinder on the binning procedure. Behavior Research Methods, 49(2), 653-673. Link