Doctoral Dissertation Grant Recipient: Matias Avellaneda

In a broad sense, choice refers to how organisms distribute the limited amount of time they have available among all possible alternatives. Richard Herrnstein famously argued that, under this definition, all behavior constitutes choice. His argument rested on the no-of visit duration in two-alternative choice. In the dissertation research proposed for the 2025 Innovative Student Research Grant, Matias showed that different assumptions about which mechanisms underlie the decision to abandon an alternative to engage with another one result in different extensions of his model when more than two alternatives are considered. Using these extensions, he designed a critical experiment whose results will support at most one of the extensions, thus showing which of the posited mechanisms (if any) are plausible. The supported model would provide tentative but feasible answers to the questions raised above, thus greatly improving our understanding of choice.