There has been considerable interest in what components of decision-making change when speed or accuracy is stressed. In many early studies, quite strict assumptions were made about parameter invariance across experimental conditions (sometimes called selective influence). Here we fit the standard diffusion model to the data from four large…

In describing how people generalize from observed samples of data to novel cases, theories of inductive inference have emphasized the learner's reliance on the contents of the sample. More recently, a growing body of literature suggests that different assumptions about how a data sample was generated can lead the learner to draw qualitatively…

A fundamental aspect of decision making is the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT): slower decisions tend to be more accurate, but because time is a scarce resource people prefer to conclude decisions more quickly. The current research adds to the SAT literature by documenting two previously unrecognized influences on the SAT: perception shifts and goal…

Integrating evidence from multiple sources to guide decisions is something humans do on a daily basis. Existing research suggests that not all sources of information are weighted equally in decision-making tasks, and that observers are subject to biases in the face of internal and external noise. Here we describe two experiments that measured…

Attribute-framing bias reflects people's tendency to evaluate positively framed objects more favorably than the same objects framed negatively. Most theoretical accounts of this bias emphasized the role of positive- and negative-framing valence in the message, disregarding the quantitative information that typically accompanies it. To examine the…

Expectations about the environment play a large role in shaping behavior, but how does this occur? Do expectations change the way we perceive the world, or just our decisions based on unbiased perceptions? We investigated the relative contributions of priors to these 2 stages by manipulating "when" information about expected color was…

Previous work with complex memory span tasks, in which simple choice decisions are imposed between presentations of to-be-remembered items, shows that these secondary tasks reduce memory span. It is less clear how reconfiguring and maintaining various amounts of information affects decision speeds. We introduced preliminary "lead-in"…

Choosing between options characterized by multiple cues can be a daunting task. People may integrate all information at hand or just use lexicographic strategies that ignore most of it. Notably, integrative strategies require knowing exact cue weights, whereas lexicographic heuristics can operate by merely knowing the importance order of cues.…

Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

Everyday task sequences, such as cooking, contain overarching goals (completing the meal), subgoals (prepare vegetables), and motor actions (chopping). Such tasks generally are considered hierarchical because superordinate levels (e.g., goals) affect performance at subordinate levels (e.g., subgoals and motor actions). However, there is debate as…

Two experiments are presented that use tasks common in research in numerical cognition with young adults and older adults as subjects. In these tasks, one or two arrays of dots are displayed, and subjects decide whether there are more or fewer dots of one kind than another. Results show that older adults, relative to young adults, tend to rely…

Previous research is mixed regarding whether laypeople are sensitive to sample size. Here the author argues that this is in part because sample size sensitivity follows a curvilinear function with decreasing sensitivity as sample size become larger. This functional form reconciles apparent discrepancies in the literature, accounting for results…

As deviations from what is expected, anomalies are typically seen as an obstruction to making good predictions or an impulse to revise the predictive framework. Here, we consider a different possibility--that anomalies, particularly those related to cognitive processing, may be a valuable source of diagnostic information. More specifically, we…

Existing research shows that the order in which evidence arrives can bias its evaluation and the resulting decision in favor of information encountered early on. We used eye-tracking to study the underlying cognitive mechanisms in the context of incentivized financial choices based on real world market data. Subjects learned about the…

In judgment and categorization, the task is to infer the criterion value of an object based on cues. The cognitive mechanisms underlying such inferences are often distinguished in terms of whether they rely on an abstracted cue-criterion rule or on retrieving exemplars. The use of cue-based and exemplar-based strategies (and the associated…