Gaze data reveal adaptive mechanisms of strategy generation in judgment and decision making

Abstract

Human beings must constantly adapt to an uncertain and mutable world by generating efficient behavioral strategies to pursue their goals. The complexity of this task increases in interactive contexts, where the outcomes of our actions depend also on the choices of other agents. When the environment does not provide reliable feedback, the effectiveness of behavioral strategies rests on the ability to handle available knowledge: agents have indeed to extract relevant information from noisy signals and build an exhaustive representation of the set of potential actions and outcomes available to themselves and to others. Individual differences in the implementation of these information- processing operations may underlie behavioral heterogeneity in several judgment and decision making tasks. Here we report three eye-tracking studies revealing the existence of distinct information-processing strategies in different individuals. Study 1 explores inter-individual differences in the generation of relational representations of interdependent contingencies. In Study 2 and Study 3, we move towards social contexts to investigate the mechanisms of strategy generation underlying strategic behavior in interaction. Our findings indicate that gaze data can disclose individual differences in the process of spontaneous strategy generation in both individual and interacting settings. We also report results suggesting that the emergence of unsophisticated information-processing strategies is associated with cognitive style. Moreover, we show that the attentional mechanisms sustaining the generation of unsophisticated strategies can be reconsidered and updated under the impact of endogenous and exogenous cues revealing the existence of alternative information-processing behaviors