The Perils of Omitting Omissions when Modeling Evidence Accumulation

Response deadlines are commonly imposed in decision-making research to incentivize speedy decisions and sustained attention. This procedure frequently leads to a proportion of trials in which no response is made, and these omissions are often simply removed from the data during analysis. Here we show that this seemingly trivial assumption is in fact quite consequential for parameter estimation. We propose that omissions should instead be treated as observations to inform inference of the underlying generative process that led to their occurrence. Using new tools from likelihood-free inference applicable to a broad class of sequential sampling models (SSMs), we enable fast computation of omission probability without explicit integration, and clarify the degree to which omitting omissions – even in seemingly benign settings – can lead researchers astray. We explore this phenomenon in the setting of SSMs with constant and time-varying boundaries, and show that parameter recovery is improved by incorporating a model of omission probability. We show that the benefits of modeling omission probability are distinct from benefits gained from past approaches of modeling attentional lapses to account for these omissions. Our findings shine a light on the consequences of omitting omission in modeling choice behavior with SSMs, and demonstrate how joint modeling of observed and omitted data can improve parameter inference and therefore the reliability of downstream scientific conclusions.