Learning affects top down and bottom up modulation of eye movements in decision making
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2013, Vol 8, Issue 6
Abstract
Repeated decision making is subject to changes over time such as decreases in decision time and information use and increases in decision accuracy. We show that a traditional strategy selection view of decision making cannot account for these temporal dynamics without relaxing main assumptions about what defines a decision strategy. As an alternative view we suggest that temporal dynamics in decision making are driven by attentional and perceptual processes and that this view has been expressed in the information reduction hypothesis. We test the information reduction hypothesis by integrating it in a broader framework of top down and bottom up processes and derive the predictions that repeated decisions increase top down control of attention capture which in turn leads to a reduction in bottom up attention capture. To test our hypotheses we conducted a repeated discrete choice experiment with three different information presentation formats. We thereby operationalized top down and bottom up control as the effect of individual utility levels and presentation formats on attention capture on a trial-by-trial basis. The experiment revealed an increase in top down control of eye movements over time and that decision makers learn to attend to high utility stimuli and ignore low utility stimuli. We furthermore find that the influence of presentation format on attention capture reduces over time indicating diminishing bottom up control.
Authors and Affiliations
Jacob L. Orquin, Martin P. Bagger and Simone Mueller Loose
Observing others’ behavior and risk taking in decisions from experience
This paper examines how observing other people’s behavior affects risk taking in repeated decision tasks. In Study 1, 100 participants performed experience-based decision tasks either alone or in pairs, with the two memb...
Studies of the dimensionality, correlates, and meaning of measures of the maximizing tendency
This series of four studies was designed to clarify the underlying dimensionality and psychological well-being correlates of the major extant measures of the maximization tendency: the Maximization Scale (MS; Schwarz et...
An attempt to clarify the link between cognitive style and political ideology: A non-western replication and extension
Previous studies relating low-effort or intuitive thinking to political conservatism are limited to Western cultures. Using Turkish and predominantly Muslim samples, Study 1 found that analytic cognitive style (ACS) is n...
The endowment effect in the genes: An exploratory study
The endowment effect is a well-documented decision phenomenon, referring to a tendency that people price a commodity higher when selling it than when buying it. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a sort of inertia, an...
Prefer a cash slap in your face over credit for halva
We investigated how frequency and amount of punishment affect the decision making of Iranian subjects. In our first experiment, performing a computer-based Persian version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), our subjects sc...