title: Strategy selection in cue-based decision making.
abstract: People can make use of a range of heuristic and rational, compensatory strategies to perform a multiple-cue judgment task. It has been proposed that people are sensitive to the amount of cognitive effort required to employ decision strategies. Experiment 1 employed a dual-task methodology to investigate whether participants' preference for heuristic versus compensatory decision strategies can be altered by increasing the cognitive demands of the task. As indicated by participants' decision times, a secondary task interfered more with the performance of a heuristic than compensatory decision strategy but did not affect the proportions of participants using either type of strategy. A stimulus set effect suggested that the conjunction of cue salience and cue validity might play a determining role in strategy selection. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that when a perceptually salient cue was also the most valid, the majority of participants preferred a single-cue heuristic strategy. Overall, the results contradict the view that heuristics are more likely to be adopted when a task is made more cognitively demanding. It is argued that people employ 2 learning processes during training, one an associative learning process in which cue-outcome associations are developed by sampling multiple cues, and another that involves the sequential examination of single cues to serve as a basis for a single-cue heuristic.
authors.affiliation: Defence Research and Development Canada.
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Bryant
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003463:Cues; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult