Collaborative Proposal: Memory-based account of cue generation and predictive inference

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Research in decision-making has increasingly focused on the use of heuristics, or short cuts, to describe judgment and decision-making, such as recent work on rationality and fast-and-frugal heuristics. The central purpose of research on fast-and-frugal heuristics is to characterize the various strategies that people employ across a variety of decision tasks, with the goal of understanding the interplay between task structure and strategy use. At the same time, other work in judgment and decision-making has begun exploring the interrelationship between basic-level cognitive processes such as attention and memory and higher-level processes involved in decision-making. For example, recent work illustrates that theoretical models based on long-term memory and working-memory are important for understanding judgment and decision making in a variety of real-world domains, such as medical diagnosis and intelligence analysis. The overarching goal of the present research is to integrate the fast-and-frugal heuristics approach with a judgment model based on basic memory theory. The researchers' goal is to address, both empirically and theoretically, how basic memory processes such as long-term memory and working memory both enable and constrain the use of fast-and-frugal heuristics. The resulting theoretical and empirical research will advance fundamental theory broadly in the area of judgment and decision making. Research on fast-and-frugal heuristics has been amongst the most influential and widely cited work within the area of judgment and decision-making over the past few decades. However, despite the proliferation of research on fast-and-frugal heuristics, aspects of the framework remain somewhat ill-defined. In particular, while the framework relies extensively on constructs from the area of memory, relatively little theoretical and empirical work has pursued this aspect of heuristic functioning. Yet, this is an important component of most real-world judgment and choice tasks, as the input to the decision process often relies upon the output of memory. The proposed work aims to address this gap in the literature by systematically investigating the role of memory in cue-based inference tasks where heuristics such as Take-the-best are assumed to operate. In addition to the project's contribution to the empirical literature, this work will break new ground on theoretical models of decision-making by merging fast-and-frugal heuristics with a memory-processes model of hypothesis generation and judgment. The proposed experiments will provide a detailed analysis of the underlying memory processes that both enable and constrain memory-based inference. The knowledge gained from this research has the potential to impact decision making in applied contexts such as risk communication and medicine, where heuristic rules are implemented as decision aids.