Collaborative Research: Attention in Games and Decisions

University Of South Florida, Tampa FL

Investigators

Abstract

Attention is a limited resource whose absence may adversely affect decision-making by increasing cognitive load. It has even been suggested that people trapped in poverty may suffer disproportionately from this problem. In this proposal the Principal Investigators undertake research to increase our understanding of the process of decision making under attentional constraints by directly quantifying what people focus on when they make their attention-allocation decisions. Such issues not only affect individuals, but also complex organizations run by CEO's and elected officials if they do not allocate their own or their employee's time efficiently across the problems they face. Thus, a detailed understanding of what attracts a decision maker's attention to a problem is of significant potential importance. If successful, the work conducted here may move us in the direction of a better understanding of the behavior of people who must make choices under self-imposed attentional constraints. On a technical level, the work proposed combines laboratory experiments with eye tracking techniques. In the experiments, subjects do not engage in strategic interactions or make decisions directly, but rather project how much time they want to allocate in the future across a set of problems presented to them. Features of these problems that attract subjects' attention will be identified using eye tracking and measures of attention time. A second goal of the project is to relate the process of attention allocation to decision making by correlating the amount of time a subject intends to allocate to contemplating a problem in the future to the decision time that subjects actually take when facing this same problem. Finally, eye tracking will be used to discover whether subjects attend to different aspects of the decision problems they face when allocating their attention as opposed to actually making a decision.