Intro 5 or 6.
Past research has investigated the temporal aspects of decision making, of when to make a decision (Ratcliff 1978, Shadlen and Newsome 2001, Smith and Ratcliff 2004, Wagenmakers 2009). This problem can be generally viewed as an optimal stopping problem, which has resulted in a set of theories that attempt to explain the response time of decisions (Wald 1948?, Luce 1986, Bogacz et al 2006). However most of these these theories only consider a single decision, and do not address the problem of how to allocate time across multiple decisions. In natural settings humans and animals face sequences of decisions, and time spent on one activity is time not spent on another. Importantly this applies to scenarios in which one of these decisions involves physical harm to an agent, something which can be a constant threat and so can influence seemingly unrelated decisions.