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…

While the influence of presentation formats have been widely studied in Bayesian reasoning tasks, we present the first systematic investigation of how presentation formats influence information search decisions. Four experiments were conducted across different probabilistic environments, where subjects (N = 2,858) chose between 2 possible search…

We examined the effects of aging on performance in an item-recognition experiment with confidence judgments. A model for confidence judgments and response time (RTs; Ratcliff & Starns, 2013) was used to fit a large amount of data from a new sample of older adults and a previously reported sample of younger adults. This model of confidence…

Additive integration of information is ubiquitous in judgment and has been shown to be effective even when multiplicative rules of probability theory are prescribed. We explore the generality of these findings in the context of estimating probabilities of success in contests. We first define a normative model of these probabilities that takes…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…

The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion are of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people's reactions to change. In this article we document a novel effect: Decision…

Previous research has demonstrated that the subjective danger and usefulness of words affect lexical decision times. Usually, an interaction is found: Increasing danger predicts faster reaction times (RTs) for words low on usefulness, but increasing danger predicts slower RTs for words high on usefulness. The authors show the same interaction with…

A test of the predicted interaction between within-category discontinuity and verbal rule complexity on information-integration and rule-based category learning was conducted. Within-category discontinuity adversely affected information-integration category learning but not rule-based category learning. Model-based analyses suggested that some…

Previous studies have suggested better learning when people actively intervene rather than when they passively observe the stimuli in a judgment task. In 4 experiments, the authors investigated the hypothesis that this improvement is associated with a shift from exemplar memory to cue abstraction. In a multiple-cue judgment task with continuous…