Foraging refers to behavior that exploits the current environment for resources and induces exploration for a better environment. Visual foraging tasks have been used to study human behavior during visual searches. Participants searched for target stimuli among the distractors and either acquired or lost points when they clicked on a target or…

Although models of word meanings based on distributional semantics have proved effective in predicting human judgments of similarity among individual concepts, it is less clear whether or how such models might be extended to account for judgments of similarity among relations between concepts. Here we combine an individual-differences approach…

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…

We explored a two-stage recognition memory paradigm in which people first make single-item "studied"/"not studied" decisions and then have a chance to correct their errors in forced-choice trials. Each forced-choice trial included one studied word ("target") and one nonstudied word ("lure") that received the…

When memories of past rewarding experiences are distorted, are relevant decision-making preferences impacted? Although recent research has demonstrated the important role of episodic memory in value-based decision making, very few have examined the role of false memory in guiding novel decision making. The current study combined the pictorial…

In reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, decision makers learn the values of actions in a context-dependent fashion. Although context dependence has many advantages, it can lead to suboptimal preferences when choice options are extrapolated beyond their original encoding contexts. Here, we tested whether we could manipulate context dependence in RL…

The exploration/exploitation trade-off (EE trade-off) describes how, when faced with several competing alternatives, decision-makers must often choose between a known good alternative (exploitation) and one or more unknown but potentially more rewarding alternatives (exploration). Prevailing theory on how humans perform the EE trade-off states…

Risky decisions are often characterized by (a) imprecision about consequences and their likelihoods that can be reduced by information collection, and by (b) unavoidable background risk. This article addresses both aspects by eliciting risk attitude, prudence, and temperance in decisions from description and decisions from experience. The results…

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…

We examined 3 different network models of representing semantic knowledge (5,018-word directed and undirected step distance networks, and an association-correlation network) to predict lexical priming effects. In Experiment 1, participants made semantic relatedness judgments for word pairs with varying path lengths. Response latencies for…

In this study, we aimed to explore whether action execution is an inherent part of the decision-making process. According to the hypothesis of embodied choice, the decision-making process is bidirectional as action dynamics exert their backward influence on decision processes through changing the cost and value of the potential options. This…

This study investigated the extent to which people can develop a global representation of local environments through across-boundary navigation. Participants learned objects' locations in two misaligned rectangular rooms in an immersive virtual environment. After learning, they adopted a local view in one room and judged directions of objects…

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…

We test empirically the strategic counterpart of the Adaptive Decision Maker hypothesis (Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993), which states that decision makers adapt their attention and decision rules to time pressure in predictable ways. For 29 normal form games, we test whether players adapt to tightening time constraints by reducing their…

Category learning is fundamental to cognition, but little is known about how it proceeds in real-world environments when learners do not have instructions to search for category-relevant information, do not make overt category decisions, and do not experience direct feedback. Prior research demonstrates that listeners can acquire task-irrelevant…