Information presentation constraints and the adaptive decision maker hypothesis.

Abstract

Participants examined sets of apartments described along 4 dimensions. Attribute values were manipulated to provide a way to infer strategy from response patterns. Experiment 1 established baseline behavior in unconstrained search, whereas Experiments 2-4 constrained participants to search either by alternative or by dimension. Dimensionwise presentation resulted in higher accuracy and reduced looking times. In 3-alternative choice, mere was no evidence that strategy use depended on constraint condition. Evidence for possible strategy differences across constraint conditions was found when either multiple judgments rather than a single choice had to be made or the number of alternatives was increased to 5. These results supported features of the adaptive decision maker hypothesis (J. W. Payne, J. R. Bettman, & E. J. Johnson, 1988) but suggested that strategy use is not always strongly linked to acquisition pattern.

Evidence for top-down control of eye movements during visual decision making

“…In contrast, in multi-alternative decisions which define a larger decision space, deep encoding of the alternatives may not always be possible given the limited information processing capacity of the decision maker. As a result, the decision maker might engage in a 'screening' process where weak alternatives are subject to shallow processing and may be excluded from further processing while promising alternatives are processed to a greater extent (Beach, 1993;Russo & Leclerc, 1994;Senter & Wedell, 1999;Wedell & Senter, 1997). Thus, for given decision task, a manipulation that increases the number of decision alternatives would be expected to increase the degree of selectivity with which decision makers process the decision information.…”

Stimulus exposure and gaze bias: A further test of the gaze cascade model

“…This dissociation suggests that the bias in dwell duration and the dwell frequency bias might index independent aspects of visual decision making. This dissociation provides support for frameworks of decision making which postulate multiple stages, processes, or strategies (e.g., Payne, 1976;Payne, Bettman, Coupey, & Johnson, 1992;Russo & Leclerc, 1994;Senter & Wedell, 1999;Wedell & Senter, 1997;see Ford, Schmitt, Schechtman, Hults, & Doherty, 1989, for a review). Our finding of gaze bias in dwell duration but not in dwell frequency early in the trial might reflect the operation of an early screening stage, where items are quickly encoded and the set of potentially relevant alternatives is reduced.…”

An Optimized Design of Choice Experiments: A New Approach for Studying Decision Behavior in Choice Task Experiments

“…This problem can be solved by including other behavioral measurements, for example, by combining procedural methods with our approach. Combining outcome-based and procedural approaches seems to be a very promising way for studying choice behavior (Harte & Koele, 2001;Rieskamp & Hoffrage, 2008;Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1996;Senter & Wedell, 1999;Riedl et al, 2008). When the GA is applied in a multi-method approach, the fitness function could be modeled such that it favors ambiguous mappings of strategies whenever overlapping strategies can be differentiated by different decision processes (or other differences with respect to behavioral measurements).…”