When the eyes have it and when not: How multiple sources of activation combine to guide eye movements during multiattribute decision making.

Abstract

Memory plays a major but underexplored role in judgment and decision making (JDM). Studying eye movements-especially how people look at empty spatial locations when retrieving from memory information previously associated with those locations-provides useful information about how memory influences JDM. This so-called looking-at-nothing behavior is thought to reflect memory-driven allocation of attention. However, eye movements are also guided toward salient visual stimuli, such as test items presented on a screen. It is unclear how these multiple sources of activation combine to guide looking-at-nothing in JDM. We investigated this question in two experiments in which participants solved multiattribute categorization tasks using an exemplar-based decision strategy. In the first experiment, we tested how the occurrence and the strength of looking-at-nothing vary with the presentation format and the amount of training participants received. Looking-at-nothing occurred during categorizations when test-item information was presented auditorily and visually, but for the latter only after visual information was removed from the screen. It occurred both when training items were learned by heart and when they were presented 10 times on the screen. A second experiment revealed that an explicit instruction to imagine retrieval-relevant information during categorizations increased lookingat-nothing but did not change the decision-making process. The results shed light on the interaction between eye movements and attention to information in memory during JDM that can be explained in light of a shared priority map in memory. A detailed understanding of this interaction forms the basis for using eye movements to study memory processes in JDM.

Eye movements as a tool to investigate exemplar retrieval in judgments

“…Experiment 2 replicated the finding for preferential judgments and ruled out the alternative hypothesis that the observed eye-movement effects occurred only because participants were instructed to respond as consistently as possible. These findings are in line with previous research showing that as the similarity between training and test items increases, people proportionally look more to the associated but emptied spatial locations (Rosner et al, 2022;Rosner & von Helversen, 2019;Scholz et al, 2015). However, does this similarity effect on eye movements mean that people retrieve information about exemplars from memory?…”

“…The goal of this study was to test whether exemplar retrieval also occurs during preferential judgments and to link eye movements to preferential judgments. Eye-movement measures based on the lookingat-nothing behavior have been shown to indicate exemplar retrieval from memory during inferential choice (Rosner et al, 2022;Rosner & von Helversen, 2019;Scholz et al, 2015). In line with previous research, we found that the amount people looked at empty spatial locations reflected the similarity (defined as a number of matches in cue values) between test items and training exemplars.…”

“…Researchers have used this phenomenon to trace what information is retrieved from memory during a wide range of JDM tasks (Jahn & Braatz, 2014;Klichowicz et al, 2021;Krefeld-Schwalb & Rosner, 2020;Pärnamets et al, 2016;Renkewitz & Jahn, 2012;Rosner et al, 2022;Rosner & von Helversen, 2019;Scholz et al, 2015Scholz et al, , 2017. In the study by Renkewitz and Jahn (2012), participants first learned attribute information about decision options that were arranged within spatial frames at distinct spatial locations on a computer screen.…”

“…In preferential judgments, in which the importance of attributes is unknown and likely varies between people, it becomes difficult to create these situations. Recent research has shown that eye movements can be studied to gain insights into how memory influences decision-making (Krefeld-Schwalb & Rosner, 2020;Pärnamets et al, 2016;Platzer et al, 2014;Renkewitz & Jahn, 2012) and the retrieval of past experiences during inferential judgments and categorizations (Rosner et al, 2022;Rosner & von Helversen, 2019;Scholz et al, 2015). In the study by Scholz et al (2015), participants first memorized multiple pieces of information about various job candidates (exemplars).…”

The contribution of eye movements to memory retrieval depends on the visual input

“…Studies have suggested that the reenactment of eye movements and the tendency to re-fixate the locations where targets were previously presented during retrieval serves a functional role in enhancing memory performance (Laeng et al, 2014; Rosner et al, 2022; Scholz et al, 2016, 2018). This view was supported by a study by Johansson & Johansson (2014), in which participants were asked to memorize the orientation and spatial location of objects and were later tested on them.…”