Eye Movements in Strategic Choice

Abstract

In risky and other multiattribute choices, the process of choosing is well described by random walk or drift diffusion models in which evidence is accumulated over time to threshold. In strategic choices, level‐k and cognitive hierarchy models have been offered as accounts of the choice process, in which people simulate the choice processes of their opponents or partners. We recorded the eye movements in 2 × 2 symmetric games including dominance‐solvable games like prisoner's dilemma and asymmetric coordination games like stag hunt and hawk–dove. The evidence was most consistent with the accumulation of payoff differences over time: we found longer duration choices with more fixations when payoffs differences were more finely balanced, an emerging bias to gaze more at the payoffs for the action ultimately chosen, and that a simple count of transitions between payoffs—whether or not the comparison is strategically informative—was strongly associated with the final choice. The accumulator models do account for these strategic choice process measures, but the level‐k and cognitive hierarchy models do not. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Now or Later? Attentional Processing and Intertemporal Choice

“…Second, the present findings also imply the degree to which one attends to different elements of the decision factors into his or her ultimate choice, which is in line with current work that uses fixations or fixation duration to capture attention to decision task parameters (Krajbich & Rangel, ; Krajbich et al, ; Stewart, Hermens, et al, ; Stewart, Gächter, et al, ). More specifically, attentional bias toward either the immediate or delayed option, respectively, predicted which option was chosen, which is also similar to findings for attentional bias when evaluating options in risky choice (Ashby, Dickert & Glöckner, ), as well as evaluating binary or multiattribute food items (Krajbich et al, , Krajbich & Rangel, ) or consumer purchasing decisions (Krajbich et al, ).…”

“…Additionally, we examined whether the first AOI (Reutskaja et al, ) or last AOI (Stewart, Hemrens & Matthews, ; Stewart, Gächter, & Noguchi, ; and cf. Krajbich & Rangel, ) examined predicted choosing the immediate option in each of the decision tasks per delay amount.…”

Investigating the Failure to Best Respond in Experimental Games

“…Some have suggested that there may be a lack of game-form recognition, i.e., a failure to understand correctly the relationship between possible choices, outcomes and payoffs (e.g., Bosch-Rosa and Meissner, 2019;Cason and Plott, 2014;Chou et al, 2009;Cox and James, 2012;Fehr and Huck, 2016;Rydval et al, 2009;Zonca et al, 2018). Studies using choice process data (e.g., Brocas et al, 2014;Devetag et al, 2016;Hristova and Grinberg, 2005;Polonio et al, 2015;Stewart et al, 2016) suggest that when choosing an action, subjects often pay disproportionally more attention to their own payoffs or to specific salient matrix cells, and a non-negligible fraction of subjects never look at the opponent's payoff, thereby completely disregarding the strategic nature of the game they are playing.…”

Psynteract: A flexible, cross-platform, open framework for interactive experiments

“…Rand, Greene, & Nowak, 2012), eye-tracking as a measure of attention paid to different pieces of information (e.g. Fiedler, Glöckner, Nicklisch, & Dickert, 2013;Fiedler & Glöckner, 2015;Stewart, Gächter, Noguchi, & Mullett, 2016), or mousetracking as a proxy for the cognitive conflict experienced during the decision (Kieslich & Hilbig, 2014).…”