Attention and Decision-making: How allocation of attention to decision alternatives influences the final choice

Research in the area of decision-making has acknowledged the role of attention in arriving to the final choice. The gaze cascade model suggests a bidirectional relationship between attention and preference – as we begin to orient towards the preferred option, such orienting further increases preference. The attentional drift diffusion model suggests that attention can amplify evidence; however, attention varies randomly between the options. This thesis aims to investigate the role of attention in decision-making from two perspectives: the decision-making models that suggest that attention can bias evidence, and the perceptual learning literature, which has investigated how exposure can affect discrimination between similar stimuli. Chapter 1 investigates whether attention can bias preference. We used a design in which some of the decision options are paired with reward-related stimuli. As we expected such stimuli to capture attention, we aimed to investigate whether such attentional capture can bias the choice. Our results showed a choice bias over short exposure times but not with self-paced decisions. Chapter 2 investigates whether attention is biased towards the eventually chosen option. Using a perceptual decision task, results showed that participants spend longer attending to the chosen option; however, the result did not replicate when the task required participants to press a key to inspect each option. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the intermixed-blocked exposure effect, a finding that shows how the manner of exposure to stimuli can affect the ease of discrimination between them. Specifically, alternating exposure to two stimuli facilitates discrimination relative to a case in which all exposures to one precede all exposures to the other. Chapter 3 investigates the inhibitory relationships account, which suggests that alternating exposure to stimuli allows for inhibitory relationships to form between their unique features, such that the presence of one signals the absence of the other. However, our experiments showed no evidence for this account. Chapter 4 investigates a memory account of the intermixed-blocked exposure effect - the account suggests that alternating exposure between two stimuli means that the unique feature of each, shown at every other exposure, requires more processing than the rest of the stimulus. However, our results showed that increasing the delay between exposures to the unique features had no effect on discrimination accuracy

The Open Anchoring Quest Dataset: Anchored Estimates from 96 Studies on Anchoring Effects

People’s estimates are biased toward previously considered numbers (anchoring). We have aggregated all available data from anchoring studies that included at least two anchors into one large dataset. Data were standardized to comprise one estimate per row, coded according to a wide range of variables, and are available for download and analyses online (https://metaanalyses.shinyapps.io/OpAQ/). Because the dataset includes both original and meta-data it allows for fine-grained analyses (e.g., correlations of estimates for different tasks) but also for meta-analyses (e.g., effect sizes for anchoring effects)

Reward-driven and memory-driven attentional biases automatically modulate rapid choice

In two experiments we examined the influence of ‘history-driven’ attentional biases on choice behavior. In Experiment 1 we used a value-modulated attentional capture procedure to induce an automatic reward-related attentional bias, and found that this bias shaped choice in a subsequent task in which participants were required to pick the highest number from a briefly displayed choice array. In Experiment 2 we investigated the influence of a working memory manipulation, and found that choice in the number-selection task was influenced by the current (and prior) contents of memory, consistent with an influence of memory-driven attentional bias on information encoding. Our findings indicate that history-driven attentional biases can translate to an influence on overt, downstream processes of behavioral choice, and should be incorporated into models of the interaction between attention and choice