Strategy Constancy Amidst Implementation Differences: Interaction-Intensive Versus Memory-Intensive Adaptations To Information Access In Decision-Making

Over the last two decades attempts to quantify decision-making have established that, under a wide range of conditions, people trade-off effectiveness for efficiency in the strategies they adopt. However, as interesting, significant, and influential as this research has been, its scope is limited by three factors; the coarseness of how effort was measured, the confounding of the costs of steps in the decision-making algorithm with the costs of steps in a given task environment, and the static nature of the decision tasks studied. In the current study, we embedded a decision-making task in a dynamic task environment and varied the cost required for the information access step. Across three conditions, small changes in the cost of interactive behavior led to changes in the strategy adopted for decision-making as well as to differences in how a step in the same strategy was implemented

The crux of cognitive load: Constraining deliberate and effortful decision processes in romantic jealousy

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2008 Elsevier B.V.DeSteno, Bartlett, Braverman, and Salovey [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 83(2002)1103–1116] challenged the evidentiary support for the hypothesis of evolved sex differences in jealousy. They attribute this support emanating from studies forcing men and women to choose between sexual and emotional infidelity as generating more negative emotional responses to a methodological artifact. This attribution is based on the results of their study allegedly demonstrating that sex differences in jealousy emerge in the forced-choice response format only when participants employ deliberate and effortful decision processes but disappear when using automatic or simple decision processes. The present study offers and tests an alternative account of their results. Specifically, the participants were forced to employ a simple decision process by either a substantial time pressure or a jealousy-related word load or jealousy-unrelated digit-string load imposed on the participants while choosing between sexual and emotional infidelity as causing more jealousy. The sex differences predicted by the evolutionary hypothesis were found in the time pressure and word-load condition, and they were attenuated in the digit-string condition. Additionally, only in the digit-load condition was sexual infidelity selected more frequently when it appeared as the first response option, indicating that the empirical basis of DeSteno et al.'s challenge of the evolutionary view of jealousy is in all likelihood attributable to a methodological artifact.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaf

Animal Spirits: Affective and Deliberative Processes in Economic Behavior

The economic conception of human behavior assumes that a person has a single set of well-defined goals, and that the person's behavior is chosen to best achieve those goals. We develop a model in which a person's behavior is the outcome of an interaction between two systems: a deliberative system that assesses options with a broad, goal-based perspective, and an affective system that encompasses emotions and motivational drives. Our model provides a framework for understanding many departures from full rationality discussed in the behavioral-economics literature, and captures the familiar feeling of being "of two minds." And by focusing on factors that moderate the relative influence of the two systems, our model also generates a variety of novel testable predictions.

Multimodal information presentation for high-load human computer interaction

This dissertation addresses the question: given an application and an interaction context, how can interfaces present information to users in a way that improves the quality of interaction (e.g. a better user performance, a lower cognitive demand and a greater user satisfaction)? Information presentation is critical to the quality of interaction because it guides, constrains and even determines cognitive behavior. A good presentation is particularly desired in high-load human computer interactions, such as when users are under time pressure, stress, or are multi-tasking. Under a high mental workload, users may not have the spared cognitive capacity to cope with the unnecessary workload induced by a bad presentation. In this dissertation work, the major presentation factor of interest is modality. We have conducted theoretical studies in the cognitive psychology domain, in order to understand the role of presentation modality in different stages of human information processing. Based on the theoretical guidance, we have conducted a series of user studies investigating the effect of information presentation (modality and other factors) in several high-load task settings. The two task domains are crisis management and driving. Using crisis scenario, we investigated how to presentation information to facilitate time-limited visual search and time-limited decision making. In the driving domain, we investigated how to present highly-urgent danger warnings and how to present informative cues that help drivers manage their attention between multiple tasks. The outcomes of this dissertation work have useful implications to the design of cognitively-compatible user interfaces, and are not limited to high-load applications

Comparison-Shopping Websites: An Empirical Investigation on the Influence of Decision Aids and Information Load on Consumer Decision-Making Behavior

Rapid advances in Internet commerce technology have brought about the emergence of comparison-shopping Websites, which act as agents to consolidate vast amounts of product information. Researchers have tradi- tionally focused on incorporating the latest database interrogation technology and investigating the economic implications of the existence of comparison-shopping Websites. Little attention has been paid to understanding whether the decision aids provided are capable of assisting a consumer in managing a large quantity of information or, more importantly, are compatible with the decision-making behavior of the consumer. This study surveys several successful comparison-shopping Websites, enumerates two comercially successful forms of decision aids (i.e., screening and sorting), and examines their effects on decision effectiveness under different information loads. Based on a 3×2×2 factorial controlled experiment, we had three major findings. First, more sophisticated screening aids that assist a consumer in filtering a large quantity of information do not necessarily improve decision effectiveness. Surprisingly, our results even suggest that in some circumstances the opposite could be true. Second, the results indicate that the effectiveness of decision aids, to a large extent, depends on the information load. Third, decision makers are adaptive. One may supplement the absence of more sophisticated screening aids with the sorting aid

TheEffects of Decision Aid Recommendations on Users’ Cognitive Processes, Memories, and Judgments

This study extends the existing decision aid literature by examining the influence of decision aid recommendations on users’ memories, decision processes, and judgments. Existing research suggests that decision aids can be beneficial in a variety of settings. Judgments or decisions, the outputs of the decision- making process, are the focus of most of the decision aid research. This study offers a more comprehensive investigation of the impact of decision aids by examining both the outputs of the decision-making process and the inputs and processes that lead to judgment and decision-making. An experiment is conducted that examines the influence of decision aid recommendations on memory patterns, search, cue usage, and judgments. Specifically, the study focuses on how positive and negative decision aid recommendations and the timing of receipt of the decision aid recommendation differentially affect these components of the decision process. The key findings of the research are: (1) decision aid recommendations create strong affective responses that are encoded in memory and cause users to reconstruct memories of financial data to be consistent with the affective response, (2) receiving a decision aid recommendation at the start of a task creates a strong initial response that acts as an initial hypothesis wherein users’ subsequent information search patterns exhibit a confirming bias, (3) receiving a decision aid recommendation later in the task creates a strong response that initiates professional skepticism and causes users’ subsequent information search patterns to exhibit a disconfirming bias, (4) decision aid recommendations influence the choice of information cues users believe to be important, (5) decision aid recommendations exert influence on users’ judgments, with the amount of influence diminishing as additional information is received, and (6) working memory capacity is a determinant in the ability to recall financial information but does not determine the extent of influence decision aid recommendations have on users. These findings, when considered together, validate the need for a more complete examination of how decision aids impact the entire decision-making process to identify potential negative consequences in addition to proposed benefits. This research demonstrates that task structure can be manipulated to mitigate certain undesirable consequences of decision aid use

Emerging priorities for HIV service delivery

Nathan Ford and co-authors discuss global priorities in the provision of HIV prevention and treatment services

Response Criterion Placement Modulates the Effects of Graded Alerting Systems on Human Performance and Learning in a Target Detection Task

Human operators can perform better with the use of an automated diagnostic aid than without the use of an aid in a signal detection task. This experiment aimed to determine whether any differences existed among graded aids—automated diagnostic aids that use a scale of confidence levels reflecting a spectrum of probabilistic information or uncertainty when making a judgment—that enabled better human detection performance, and either binary or graded aid produced better learning. Participants performed a visual search framed as a medical decision making task. Stimuli were arrays of random polygons (“cells”) generated by distorting a prototype shape. The target was a shape more strongly distorted than the accompanying distracters. A target was present on half of the trials. Each participant performed the task with the assistance of either a binary aid, one of three graded aids, or no aid. The aids’ sensitivities were the same (d′ = 2); the difference between the aids lay in the placement of their decision criteria, which determines a tradeoff between the aid’s predictive value and the frequency with which it makes a diagnosis. The graded aid with 90% reliability provided a judgment on the greatest number of trials, the graded aid with 94% reliability gave a judgment on fewer trials, and the third graded aid with 96% reliability gave a judgment on the least number of trials. The binary aid with 84% reliability gave a judgment on each trial. All aids improved human detection performance, though the graded aids trended towards improving performance more than the binary aid. The binary and graded aids did not produce significantly better or worse learning than did unaided performance. The binary and graded aids did not significantly help learning, but they certainly did not worsen human detection performance when compared to the unaided condition. These results imply that the decision boundaries of a graded alert might be fixed to encourage appropriate reliance on the aid and improve human detection performance, and indicate employing either a graded or binary automated aid may be beneficial to learning in a detection task