Explaining inter-individual variability in strategy selection: A cue weight learning approach
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چکیده
Do people integrate all the information at hand when they make choices or do they employ heuristics that ignore some of it? Recent research indicates that people’s behavior should and does depend on the statistical properties of the environments within which cognition operates. However, in a single environment there are always decision makers who rely on less effective strategies. The source of this inter-individual variation has not been identified yet. In this article we postulate that it can be largely explained by differences in the speed of learning. We designed an experiment where participants first made choices between three multi-cue alternatives and received feedback about their quality. In a second stage, they predicted the quality of alternatives without receiving feedback. The quality was a linear combination of cue weights and cue values. To employ heuristics the participants had to learn at least weight directions and ranks, while for the integrative strategy they needed to learn the cue weights. We find that participants who showed evidence of learning cue weights rather than the ordering performed well in the estimation task that followed decisions, with cue weight knowledge being strongly related to decision performance. Further, we find that differences in how fast participants learn the cue weights explain the variability in regards to what strategy they adopted within an environment.
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تاریخ انتشار 2016