Sequential consumer choice as multi-cued retrieval

Hornsby, Adam N.; Love, Bradley C.

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abl9754

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Our work contributes to the emerging body of research that offers researchers a naturalistic search domain to study active learning (Bramley et al, 2018; Hornsby & Love, 2022; Liefgreen et al, 2020; Z. H. Zhang et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limitations to optimal search in naturalistic active learning.

He,

Richie,

Bhatia

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Optimality in active learning is under intense debate in numerous disciplines. We introduce a new empirical paradigm for studying naturalistic active learning, as well as new computational tools for jointly modeling algorithmic and rational theories of information search. Participants in our task can ask questions and learn about hundreds of everyday items but must retrieve queried items from memory. To maximize information gain, participants need to retrieve sequences of dissimilar items. In eight experiments (N = 795), we find that participants are unable to do this. Instead, associative memory mechanisms lead to the successive retrieval of similar items, an established memory effect known as semantic congruence. The extent of semantic congruence (and thus suboptimality in question asking) is unaffected by task instructions and incentives, though participants can identify efficient query sequences when given a choice between query sequences. Overall, our results indicate that participants can distinguish between optimal and suboptimal search if explicitly asked to do so, but have difficulty implementing optimal search from memory. We conclude that associative memory processes may place critical restrictions on people's ability to ask good questions in naturalistic active learning tasks. Public Significance StatementThe ability to guide our own learning is one of the greatest developmental tools we have. A common theory of such self-guided or "active" learning is that people tend to ask questions that gather the most information. However, most work supporting this theory is based on research with simple domains where questions need not be generated from memory. We show that in more complex domains, where more realistic questions must be recalled, subjects are far less able to generate optimal queries. This suggests that optimal question asking may be more limited in naturalistic, everyday domains than previously thought.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limitations to optimal search in naturalistic active learning.

He,

Richie,

Bhatia

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…In a recent "big data" analysis of over 135,000 sequential grocery purchase decisions, Hornsby and Love (2022) showed that the decision to select an item for purchase from an online store is cued by recently selected items. In their model, the similarity between potential choices and previously selected items is based on a comparison across different representations.…”

Section: What Are the Implications For Real-world Categorization?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Further tests of sequence-sensitive models in a modified garner task using separable dimensions.

Lin¹,

Little²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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In the study of perceptual categorization, a key distinction is made between separable and integral dimensions. Separable dimensions are easy to attend in isolation, while integral dimensions are not. Little et al. (2016) showed that when trial-by-trial responses are analyzed, a consistent pattern of sequential effects was found in a modified Garner paradigm using integral-dimension stimuli. The present experiments investigated whether these pronounced sequential effects are also found with separable-dimension stimuli. Four experiments using two different types of separable dimensions were conducted. The results indicated that similar patterns of sequential effects were present for separable-dimension stimuli, but, unlike for integral dimensions, the effect of a change in the irrelevant dimension in the filtering task was not found. Further, for separable dimensions, the overall pattern of sequential effects did not vary between the Garner tasks (i.e., control, correlated, and filtering). To explain these results, we fit a sequence-sensitive exemplar model and compared the fits of this model to a novel sequence-sensitive feature model, in which only the relevant feature influences the categorization decision. We found that the full exemplar model provided a more compelling account of both our separable dimension data and the integral dimension data of Little et al. (2016). These findings provide a more complete understanding of perceptual categorization and add to the growing body of literature on the prevalence and critical implications of strong sequential effects in cognitive tasks.

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Memory and learning

Jansson-Boyd,

Bright

2024

Consumer Neuroscience

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Sequential consumer choice as multi-cued retrieval

Cited by 6 publications

References 49 publications

Limitations to optimal search in naturalistic active learning.

Limitations to optimal search in naturalistic active learning.

Further tests of sequence-sensitive models in a modified garner task using separable dimensions.

Memory and learning

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