Introduction Studies of categorical decision-making attempt to understand behavior by probing how different features of complex and changing environments guide the selection of choices. While the parameters underlying these features often span a continuous range, the potential set of possible behavioral options is discrete. The neuroscientific study of decision-making draws heavily on the fields of psychology, economics, statistics, and ecology. Neuroscientific approaches to decisionmaking aim to reveal computational principles that can be mapped onto their neurobiological implementation.

There are two dominant traditions in neuroscience and psychology to study categorical decisions: perceptual and value-based decisionmaking. Perceptual decision-making focuses on how accurate decisions are reached by resolving perceptual uncertainty. In value-based decisionmaking, the stimuli themselves are not ambiguous, rather the value or utility of different options needs to be estimated based on prior experience. In both cases, the goal is to systematically manipulate different features of the environment in order to understand how they guide behavior.