Deciding with the eye: How the visually manipulated accessibility of information in memory influences decision behavior

Abstract

Decision situations are typically characterized by uncertainty: Individuals do not know the values of different options on a criterion dimension. For example, consumers do not know which is the healthiest of several products. To make a decision, individuals can use information about cues that are probabilistically related to the criterion dimension, such as sugar content or the concentration of natural vitamins. In two experiments, we investigated how the accessibility of cue information in memory affects which decision strategy individuals rely on. The accessibility of cue information was manipulated by means of a newly developed paradigm, the spatial-memory-cueing paradigm, which is based on a combination of the looking-at-nothing phenomenon and the spatial-cueing paradigm. The results indicated that people use different decision strategies, depending on the validity of easily accessible information. If the easily accessible information is valid, people stop information search and decide according to a simple take-the-best heuristic. If, however, information that comes to mind easily has a low predictive validity, people are more likely to integrate all available cue information in a compensatory manner.

Do People Order Cues by Retrieval Fluency when Making Probabilistic Inferences?

“…To sum up, our results corroborate previous findings, which show that experimentally manipulated memory accessibility of cue knowledge influences decision processes (e.g., Platzer & Bröder, 2012;Platzer et al, 2014) and generally contribute to ecological models of decision making (e.g., Dougherty, Gettys, & Ogden, 1999;Juslin & Persson, 2002;Marewski & Schooler, 2011;Stewart, Chater, & Brown, 2006) by extending these findings to a frequencybased manipulation of memory accessibility. Our findings indicate that decision makers sample cues in order of fluency when making decisions from memory, at least in settings where a cue hierarchy is not particularly salient.…”

“…The authors found that when cue salience was congruent with cue validity order, the use of take‐the‐best increased, whereas for an incongruent order, the use of compensatory decision strategies prevailed. Platzer, Bröder, and Heck () replicated this finding with verbal materials. In their study, memory accessibility of verbal cues was manipulated visually at the time of retrieval.…”

Evaluating Scientists as Sources of Science Information: Evidence From Eye Movements

“…This phenomenon in which individuals, while retrieving information from memory, gaze back at spatial locations previously associated with that information (during encoding) has been observed by other studies across different contexts and domains (Johansson & Johansson, 2014;Platzer, Bröder, & Heck, 2014;Renkewitz & Jahn, 2012;Scholz, Mehlhorn, & Krems, 2016;Scholz, von Helversen, & Rieskamp, 2015;Spivey & Geng, 2001). Collectively, these studies suggest that eye movements can be used as a measure of memory retrieval without the need for self-report responses.…”

Retrospective Evaluations of Sequences

“…In line with the present series of results, the authors also found that participants tended to recall the extreme outcomes (i.e., the largest gains and losses) early in the recall protocol. Finally, Platzer, Bröder, & Heck, 2014 (see also Platzer & Bröder, 2012) showed that a memory-based approach can also explain the decision strategies used in multi-attribute decision-making (MADM). In MADM, information elements of different quality need to be integrated in order to reach a decision or make a choice.…”