Does Attention Increase the Value of Choice Alternatives?

The role of visual attention in opportunity cost neglect and consideration

Choices necessitate opportunity costs: choosing one option means foregoing another. Despite their critical role in decision making, people often neglect opportunity costs and are less likely to make purchases when reminded of them. Here, we seek to understand whether and how opportunity-cost neglect can be explained by attention, a relationship that has been proposed but not explicitly tested. Participants made eye-tracked, incentivized purchase decisions in two conditions: one with implicit opportunity costs (e.g., "Buy" vs. "Do Not Buy") and one with explicit opportunity costs (e.g., "Buy" vs. "Keep Money"). Across two studies (approximately 30,000 choices), we find lower purchase rates when opportunity costs are explicit. More importantly, we show that the relationship between attention and opportunity cost considerations is two-fold. First, the amount of attention to the outside option is greater when opportunity costs are explicit, which partly accounts for the effect of opportunity cost salience on choice. Second, for some framings, the predictive power of attention to opportunity costs is greater when opportunity costs are explicit. Using the attentional drift-diffusion model, we model the effect of opportunity cost salience on choice via attention. These findings help explain why people are more likely to purchase when explicit opportunity cost reminders are absent.

Emotion-Guided Attention Impacts Deliberate Multi-Evidence Emotion-Related Perceptual Decision-Making

Emotion-guided endogenous attention (e.g., attending to fear) may play a crucial role in determining how humans integrate emotional evidence from various sources when assessing the general emotional tenor of the environment. For instance, what emotion a presenter focuses on can shape their perception of the overall emotion of the room. While there is an increasing interest in understanding how endogenous attention affects emotion perception, existing studies have largely focused on single-stimulus perception. There is limited understanding of how endogenous attention influences emotion evidence integration across multiple sources. To investigate this question, human participants (N = 40) were invited to judge the average emotion across an array of faces ranging from fearful to happy. Endogenous attention was manipulated by instructing participants to decide whether the face array was "fearful or not" (fear attention), "happy or not" (happy attention). Eye movement results revealed an endogenous attention-induced sampling bias such that participants paid more attention to extreme emotional evidence congruent with the target emotion. Computational modeling revealed that endogenous attention shifted the decision criterion to be more conservative, leading to reduced target-category decisions. These findings unraveled the cognitive and computational mechanisms of how endogenous attention impacts the way we gather emotional evidence and make integrative decisions, shedding light on emotion-related decision-making.

Manipulating attention facilitates cooperation

Cooperation is essential for human societies, but not all individuals cooperate to the same degree. This is typically attributed to individual motives - for example, to be prosocial or to avoid risks. Here, we investigate whether cooperative behavior can, in addition, reflect what people pay attention to and whether cooperation may therefore be influenced by manipulations that direct attention. We first analyze the attentional patterns of participants playing one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games and find that choices indeed relate systematically to attention to specific social outcomes, as well as to individual eye movement patterns reflecting attentional strategies. To test for the causal impact of attention independently of participants' prosocial and risk attitudes, we manipulate the task display and find that cooperation is enhanced when displays facilitate attention to others' outcomes. Machine learning classifiers trained on these attentional patterns confirm that attentional strategies measured using eye-tracking can accurately predict cooperation out-of-sample. Our findings demonstrate that theories of cooperation can benefit from incorporating attention and that attentional interventions can improve cooperative outcomes.

Incomparability and Incommensurability in Choice: No Common Currency of Value?

Models of decision-making typically assume the existence of some common currency of value, such as utility, happiness, or inclusive fitness. This common currency is taken to allow comparison of options and to underpin everyday choice. Here we suggest instead that there is no universal value scale, that incommensurable values pervade everyday choice, and hence that most existing models of decision-making in both economics and psychology are fundamentally limited. We propose that choice objects can be compared only with reference to specific but nonuniversal "covering values." These covering values may reflect decision-makers' goals, motivations, or current states. A complete model of choice must accommodate the range of possible covering values. We show that abandoning the common-currency assumption in models of judgment and decision-making necessitates rank-based and "simple heuristics" models that contrast radically with conventional utility-based approaches. We note that if there is no universal value scale, then Arrow's impossibility theorem places severe bounds on the rationality of individual decision-making and hence that there is a deep link between the incommensurability of value, inconsistencies in human decision-making, and rank-based coding of value. More generally, incommensurability raises the question of whether it will ever be possible to develop single-quantity-maximizing models of decision-making.

Social threat avoidance depends on action-outcome predictability

Avoiding threatening individuals is pivotal for adaptation to our social environment. Yet, it remains unclear whether social threat avoidance is subtended by goal-directed processes, in addition to stimulus-response associations. To test this, we manipulated outcome predictability during spontaneous approach/avoidance decisions from avatars displaying angry facial expressions. Across three virtual reality experiments, we showed that participants avoided more often when they could predict the outcome of their actions, indicating goal-directed processes. However, above-chance avoidance rate when facing unpredictable outcomes suggested that stimulus-response associations also played a role. We identified two latent classes of participants: the "goal-directed class" showed above-chance avoidance only in the predictable condition, while the "stimulus-response class" showed no credible difference between conditions but had a higher overall avoidance rate. The goal-directed class exhibited greater cardiac deceleration in the predictable condition, associated with better value integration in decision-making. Computationally, this class had an increased drift-rate in the predictable condition, reflecting increased value estimation of threat avoidance. In contrast, the stimulus-response class showed higher responsiveness to threat, indicated by increased drift-rate for avoidance and increased muscular activity at response time. These results support the central role of goal-directed processes in social threat avoidance and reveal its physiological and computational correlates.

Two fundamentally different mechanisms by which unconscious information impairs behavioral performance: Evidence from fMRI and computational modeling

It is increasingly clear that unconscious information impairs the performance of the corresponding action when the instruction to act is delayed. However, whether this impairment occurs at the response level or at the perceptual level remains controversial. This study used fMRI and a computational model with a pre-post design to address this elusive issue. The fMRI results showed that when the unconscious information containing strong stimulus-response associations was irrelevant to subsequent stimuli, the precuneus in the parietal lobe, which is thought to be involved in sensorimotor processing, was activated. In contrast, when the unconscious information was relevant to subsequent stimuli, regardless of the strength of the stimulus-response associations, some regions in the occipital and temporal cortices, which are thought to be involved in visual perceptual processing, were activated. In addition, the percent signal change in the regions of interest associated with motor inhibition was modulated by compatibility in the irrelevant but not in the relevant stimuli conditions. Modeling of behavioral data further supported that the irrelevant and relevant stimuli conditions involved fundamentally different mechanisms. Our finding reconciles the debate about the mechanism by which unconscious information impairs action performance and has important implications for understanding of unconscious cognition.

Attention biases the process of risky decision-making: Evidence from eye-tracking

Attention determines what kind of option information is processed during risky choices owing to the limitation of visual attention. This paper reviews research on the relationship between higher-complexity risky decision-making and attention as illustrated by eye-tracking to explain the process of risky decision-making by the effect of attention. We demonstrate this process from three stages: the pre-phase guidance of options on attention, the process of attention being biased, and the impact of attention on final risk preference. We conclude that exogenous information can capture attention directly to salient options, thereby altering evidence accumulation. In particular, for multi-attribute risky decision-making, attentional advantages increase the weight of specific attributes, thus biasing risk preference in different directions. We highlight the significance of understanding how people use available information to weigh risks from an information-processing perspective via process data.

Peripheral Visual Information Halves Attentional Choice Biases

A growing body of research has shown that simple choices involve the construction and comparison of values at the time of decision. These processes are modulated by attention in a way that leaves decision makers susceptible to attentional biases. Here, we studied the role of peripheral visual information on the choice process and on attentional choice biases. We used an eye-tracking experiment in which participants (N = 50 adults) made binary choices between food items that were displayed in marked screen "shelves" in two conditions: (a) where both items were displayed, and (b) where items were displayed only when participants fixated within their shelves. We found that removing the nonfixated option approximately doubled the size of the attentional biases. The results show that peripheral visual information is crucial in facilitating good decisions and suggest that individuals might be influenceable by settings in which only one item is shown at a time, such as e-commerce.

Modeling Eye Movements During Decision Making: A Review

This article reviews recent advances in the psychometric and econometric modeling of eye-movements during decision making. Eye movements offer a unique window on unobserved perceptual, cognitive, and evaluative processes of people who are engaged in decision making tasks. They provide new insights into these processes, which are not easily available otherwise, allow for explanations of fundamental search and choice phenomena, and enable predictions of future decisions. We propose a theoretical framework of the search and choice tasks that people commonly engage in and of the underlying cognitive processes involved in those tasks. We discuss how these processes drive specific eye-movement patterns. Our framework emphasizes the central role of task and strategy switching for complex goal attainment. We place the extant literature within that framework, highlight recent advances in modeling eye-movement behaviors during search and choice, discuss limitations, challenges, and open problems. An agenda for further psychometric modeling of eye movements during decision making concludes the review.

Complex economic decisions from simple neurocognitive processes: the role of interactive attention

Neurocognitive theories of value-based choice propose that people additively accumulate choice attributes when making decisions. These theories cannot explain the emergence of complex multiplicative preferences such as those assumed by prospect theory and other economic models. We investigate an interactive attention mechanism, according to which attention to attributes (like payoffs) depends on other attributes (like probabilities) attended to previously. We formalize this mechanism using a Markov attention model combined with an accumulator decision process, and test our model on eye-tracking and mouse-tracking data in risky choice. Our tests show that interactive attention is necessary to make good choices, that most participants display interactive attention and that allowing for interactive attention in accumulation-based decision models improves their predictions. By equipping established decision models with sophisticated attentional dynamics, we extend these models to describe complex economic choice, and in the process, we unify two prominent theoretical approaches to studying value-based decision making.

Filling the gaps: Cognitive control as a critical lens for understanding mechanisms of value-based decision-making

While often seeming to investigate rather different problems, research into value-based decision making and cognitive control have historically offered parallel insights into how people select thoughts and actions. While the former studies how people weigh costs and benefits to make a decision, the latter studies how they adjust information processing to achieve their goals. Recent work has highlighted ways in which decision-making research can inform our understanding of cognitive control. Here, we provide the complementary perspective: how cognitive control research has informed understanding of decision-making. We highlight three particular areas of research where this critical interchange has occurred: (1) how different types of goals shape the evaluation of choice options, (2) how people use control to adjust the ways they make their decisions, and (3) how people monitor decisions to inform adjustments to control at multiple levels and timescales. We show how adopting this alternate viewpoint offers new insight into the determinants of both decisions and control; provides alternative interpretations for common neuroeconomic findings; and generates fruitful directions for future research.

Cognitive and neural principles of a memory bias on preferential choices

Value-based decisions depend on different forms of memory. However, the respective roles of memory and valuation processes that give rise to these decisions are often vaguely described and have rarely been investigated jointly. In this review article, we address the problem of memory-based decision making from a neuroeconomic perspective. We first describe the neural and cognitive processes involved in decisions requiring memory processes, with a focus on episodic memory. Based on the results of a systematic research program, we then spotlight the phenomenon of the memory bias, a general preference for choice options that can be retrieved from episodic memory more successfully. Our findings indicate that failed memory recall biases neural valuation processes as indicated by altered effective connectivity between the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This bias can be attributed to meta-cognitive beliefs about the relationship between subjective value and memory as well as to uncertainty aversion. After summarizing the findings, we outline potential future research endeavors to integrate the two research traditions of memory and decision making.

Magnitude-sensitivity: rethinking decision-making

Magnitude-sensitivity refers to the result that performance in decision-making, across domains and organisms, is affected by the total value of the possible alternatives. This simple result offers a window into fundamental issues in decision-making and has led to a reconsideration of ecological decision-making, prominent computational models of decision-making, and optimal decision-making. Moreover, magnitude-sensitivity has inspired the design of new robotic systems that exploit natural solutions and apply optimal decision-making policies. In this article, we review the key theoretical and empirical results about magnitude-sensitivity and highlight the importance that this phenomenon has for the understanding of decision-making. Furthermore, we discuss open questions and ideas for future research.

Eye-tracking research on sensory and consumer science: A review, pitfalls and future directions

Visual processing is a core cognitive element of sensory and consumer science. Consumers visually attend to food types, packaging, label design, advertisements, supermarket shelves, food menus, and other visible information. During the past decade, sensory and consumer science have used eye tracking to elucidate visual processing by consumers. This review paper summarizes earlier findings in terms of bottom-up (i.e., stimulus-driven) processing such as visual salience, size, and top-down (i.e., goal-driven) processing such as goals, task instructions, task complexity, and emotions. Downstream effects of gaze on choice are also reviewed. Pitfalls and future directions of eye-tracking research on sensory and consumer science are also discussed.

Sounds Healthy: Modelling sound-evoked consumer food choice through visual attention

Food choice is a multifaceted construct that is not solely guided by our internal incentives. In fact, sensory scientist, consumer psychologists, and marketers have demonstrated that external ambient cues, including background music, can influence myriads of subconscious consumer behaviors, effectively leading to increased sales of food and beverages. However, the vast majority of literature in on this topic has thus far been confined to monocultural field studies in which the underlying mechanisms of food choice are unexplored. We therefore studied the explicit and implicit effects of custom-composed soundtracks on food choices and eye-movements in consumers from both 'East' and 'West'. Firstly, based on the results from a pre-study (N = 396), we composed a 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' soundtrack. Subsequently, we recruited 215 participants from China (n = 114) and Denmark (n = 101) respectively for in an in-laboratory eye-tracking food choice paradigm. For each culture, half of the participants listened to the 'healthy' soundtrack and the other half to the 'unhealthy' soundtrack during the experiment. Chi-square tests of independence revealed that across cultures, the healthy (vs. unhealthy) soundtrack led to more healthy food choices. Similarly, the generalized linear mixed models showed that the healthy soundtrack induced more and longer fixations on healthy (vs. unhealthy) food. Finally, a multiple mediation analysis signified a partial mediation effect of sound on food choice through the mediators of fixation duration, fixation count, and revisit count. Our results indicate that, with strategically chosen soundscapes, it is possible to influence consumers' decision-making processes and guide their attention towards healthier foods, providing valuable knowledge for local as well as global food business.