Recognition - based judgments and decisions :

Does a sense of recognition play a pre-eminent role when it comes to people’s inferences and choices? Many studies have investigated how people make decisions based on their previous encounters with an object or situation. To illustrate this, researchers have examined how consumers rely on their familiarity with brand names when deciding which consumer goods to buy (Coates, Butler, & Berry, 2004, 2006). Several related concepts have been investigated: recognition (e.g., Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002; Schooler & Hertwig, 2005), which we use here to distinguish between alternatives, such as brands people believe they have heard of before and those they have not; familiarity (e.g., Dougherty, Franco-Watkins, & Thomas, 2008; Mandler, 1980), which is frequently used to denote