Decision Speed Induces Context Effects in Choice
Abstract
The context in which a decision occurs can influence the decision-making process in many ways. In the laboratory, this is often evident in the effects of recent decisions. For instance, many experiments combine easy and difficult decisions, such as when word frequency is manipulated in lexical decision. The “blocking effect” describes how such decisions differ depending on whether the conditions are presented in pure blocks (comprised purely of easy or hard stimuli) or mixed blocks (also known as a “mixing cost”). We present a novel extension to these context effects, demonstrating in two experiments that they can be induced using conditions with identical difficulty, but different timing properties. This suggests that explanations of context effects based on task difficulty or error monitoring alone might be insufficient, and suggest a role for decision time. In prior work, we suggested such a hypothesis under the assumption that observers minimize their decision time, subject to an accuracy constraint. Consistent with this explanation, we find that decisions in slower conditions were based on less evidence when they were experienced in mixed compared to pure blocks.
References
(1974). A new look at the statistical model identification. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 19, 716–723.
(2004). An integrated theory of the mind. Psychological Review, 111, 1036–1060.
(2011). Acquisition of decision making criteria: Reward rate ultimately beats accuracy. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 73, 640–657.
(1994). A sequential procedure for multihypothesis testing. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 40, 1994–2007.
(2006). The physics of optimal decision making: A formal analysis of models of performance in two-alternative forced choice tasks. Psychological Review, 113, 700–765.
(2005). A ballistic model of choice response time. Psychological Review, 112, 117–128.
(2008). The simplest complete model of choice reaction time: Linear ballistic accumulation. Cognitive Psychology, 57, 153–178.
(2009). Observing evidence accumulation during multi-alternative decisions. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 53, 453–462.
(2004). Multimodel inference: Understanding AIC and BIC in model selection. Sociological Methods & Research, 33, 261–304.
(1988). Psychological models of deferred decision making. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 32, 91–134.
(1999). Multihypothesis sequential probability ratio tests-part I: Asymptotic optimality. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 45, 2448–2461.
(2000). Multihypothesis sequential probability ratio tests-part II: Accurate asymptotic expansions for the expected sample size. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 46, 1366–1383.
(2008). The striatum facilitates decision-making under time pressure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 105, 17538–17542.
(2004). Likelihood ratios: A simple and flexible statistic for empirical psychologists. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 791–806.
(
in press a ). Context effects in multi-alternative decision making: Empirical data and a Bayesian model. Cognitive Science.(
in press b ). An optimal adjustment procedure to minimize experiment time in decisions with multiple alternatives. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.(1952). On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 4, 11–26.
(1953). Stimulus information as a determinant of reaction time. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 45, 188–196.
(2009). Optimal response initiation: Why recent experience matters. In , Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, (Vol. 21, pp. 785–792). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(1981). Context effects in sentence verification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7, 688–700.
(2011). Doing Bayesian data analysis: A tutorial with R and BUGS. Oxford, UK: Academic Press.
(1994). Using confidence intervals in within-subject designs. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 476–490.
(1996). On the origin of mixing costs: Exploring information processing in pure and mixed blocks of trials. Acta Psychologica, 94, 145–188.
(1997). Strategic control in a naming task: Changing routes or changing deadlines? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 570–590.
(2003). Mixing costs and mixing benefits in naming words, pictures and sums. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 556–575.
. (2011). nlme: Linear and nonlinear mixed effects models. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from www.R-project.org/
(1995). Bayesian model selection in social research. In , Sociological methodology (pp. 111–196). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
(1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85, 59–108.
(2009). Bayesian t-tests for accepting and rejecting the null hypothesis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 225–237.
(2011). A memory-based model of Hick’s Law. Cognitive Psychology, 62, 193–222.
(1978). Estimating the dimension of a model. Annals of Statistics, 6, 461–464.
(2010). The effects of aging on the speed-accuracy compromise: Boundary optimality in the diffusion model. Psychology and Aging, 25, 377–390.
(1974). Laws of visual choice reaction time. Psychological Review, 81, 75–98.
(2001). On the time course of perceptual choice: The leaky competing accumulator model. Psychological Review, 108, 550–592.
(2002). Hick’s Law in a stochastic race model with speed-accuracy tradeoff. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 46, 704–715.
(1979). Decision processes in visual perception. London, UK: Academic Press.
(1998). Dynamic models of simple judgments: I. Properties of a self-regulating accumulator module. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, 2, 169–194.
(2000). Dynamic models of simple judgments: II. Properties of a self-organizing PAGAN (parallel, adaptive, generalized accumulator network) model for multi-choice tasks. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, 4, 1–31.
(2007). A practical solution to the pervasive problems of p values. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 779–804.
(2010). Bayesian hypothesis testing for psychologists: A tutorial on the Savage-Dickey method. Cognitive Psychology, 60, 158–189.
(1980). Reaction times. London, UK: Academic Press.
(1977). Speed-accuracy tradeoff and information processing dynamics. Acta Psychologica, 41, 67–85.
