Speed-accuracy tradeoffs in decision making: Perception shifts and goal activation bias decision thresholds

A fundamental aspect of decision making is the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT): slower decisions tend to be more accurate, but since time is a scarce resource people prefer to conclude decisions more quickly. The current research adds to the SAT literature by documenting two previously unrecognized influences on the SAT: perception shifts and goal activation. Decision makers' perceptions of what constitutes a fast or a slow decision, and what constitutes an accurate or inaccurate decision, are based on prior experience, and these perceptions influence decision speed. Similarly, previous experience in a decision context associates the context with a particular decision goal. Thus, in later decisions the decision context will activate this goal, and thereby influence decision speed. Both of these mechanisms contribute to a specific decision bias: decision speeds are biased toward original decision speeds in a decision context. Four experiments provide evidence for the bias and the two contributing mechanisms.

Case Report: Neurologic Presentation of West Nile Virus: Difficult Diagnosis

West Nile virus infections have surged across the globe. South Texas, located on the path of bird migration, with Culex quinquefasciatus and other Culex species, and biotic primers that predispose the area to epidemics (floods, amplifying hosts, and lack of mosquito control and prevention) remains a highly endemic area for arbovirus spread. West Nile virus infection ranges from mild febrile illness to severe central nervous system involvement. The purpose of this report is to highlight complex presentations of WNV and how confounding presenting symptoms delay diagnosis. The secondary goal is to describe how pandemics, such as SARS-CoV-2, can overwhelm the system and result in medical decision bias errors.

Self-protecting motivation, indexed by self-threat, modifies retrieval-induced-forgetting and confidence in employment decision bias against out-group targets

Human memory is malleable by both social and motivational factors and holds information relevant to workplace decisions. Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) describes a phenomenon where retrieval practice impairs subsequent memory for related (unpracticed) information. We report two RIF experiments. Chinese participants received a mild self-threat manipulation (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 1) before an ethnicity-RIF task that involved practicing negative traits of either in-group (Chinese) or an out-group (Japanese) target. After a subsequent memory test, participants selected their preferred applicant for employment. RIF scores correspond to forgetting of unpracticed positive traits of one target (Rp−) relative to the recall of practiced negative traits of the other target (Rp+). Enhanced forgetting of positive traits was found in both experiments for both targets. Across experiments, a significant target by threat interaction showed that target ethnicity modified RIF (an ethnicity-RIF effect). Inducing a self-protecting motivation enhanced RIF effects for the out-group (Japanese) target. In a subsequent employment decision, there was a strong bias to select the in-group target, with the confidence in these decisions being associated with RIF scores. This study suggests that rehearsing negative traits of minority applicants can affect metacognitive aspects of employment decisions, possibly by shaping the schemas available to the majority (in-group) employer. To disrupt systemic racism, recruitment practices should aim to offset a human motivation to protect one-self, when exposed to a relatively mild threat to self-esteem. Discussing the negative traits of minority applicants is a critical, and sensitive, aspect of decision-making that warrants careful practice. These data suggest that recruiting individuals should be reminded of their personal strengths in this context, not their vulnerabilities, to secure their decision-making for fairer recruitment practice.

Attention alters certainty but not appearance

Does paying attention to a stimulus change its appearance or merely influence the decision mechanisms involved in reporting it? Recently we proposed an uncertainty stealing hypothesis in which subjects, when uncertain about a perceptual comparison between a cued and uncued stimulus, tend to disproportionately choose the cued stimulus. The result is a psychometric function that mimics the results that would be measured if attention actually changed the appearance of the cued stimulus. In the present study, we measure uncertainty explicitly. In three separate experiments, subjects judged the relative appearance of two Gabor patches that differed in contrast. In the first two experiments, subjects performed a comparative judgment, reporting which stimulus had the higher contrast. In the third experiment, subjects performed an equality judgment, reporting whether the two stimuli had the same or different contrast. In the first comparative judgment experiment and in the equality judgment experiment, one of the two stimuli was pre-cued by an exogenous cue. In the second comparative judgment experiment, a decision bias was explicitly introduced: one stimulus was followed by a post-cue and the subjects were instructed, when uncertain, to choose the cued target. In all three experiments, subjects also indicated whether or not they were certain about each response. The results reveal that in the pre-cue comparative judgment, attention shifted the subjects’ uncertainty and made subjects more likely to report that the cued stimulus had higher contrast. In the post-cue biased comparative judgment, subjects also were more likely to report that the cued stimulus had higher contrast, but without a shift in uncertainty. In the equality judgment, attention did not affect the contrast judgment, and the subjects’ uncertainty remained aligned with their decision. We conclude that attention does not alter appearance but rather manipulates subjects’ uncertainty and decision mechanisms.

The Influence of Commodity Presentation Mode on Online Shopping Decision Preference Induced by the Serial Position Effect

The information cluster that supports the final decision in a decision task is usually presented as a series of information. According to the serial position effect, the decision result is easily affected by the presentation order of the information. In this study, we seek to investigate how the presentation mode of commodities and the informativeness on a shopping website will influence online shopping decisions. To this end, we constructed two experiments via a virtual online shopping environment. The first experiment suggests that the serial position effect can induce human computer interaction decision-making bias, and user decision-making results in separate evaluation mode are more prone to the recency effect, whereas user decision-making results in joint evaluation mode are more prone to the primacy effect. The second experiment confirms the influence of explicit and implicit details of information on the decision bias of the human computer interaction caused by the serial position effect. The results of the research will be better applied to the design and development of shopping websites or further applied to the interactive design of complex information systems to alleviate user decision-making biases and induce users to make more rational decisions.

Cognitive processes behind the shooter bias: Dissecting response bias, motor preparation and information accumulation

A rich body of research points to racial biases in so-called police officer dilemma tasks: participants are generally faster and less error-prone to “shoot” (vs. not “shoot”) Black (vs. White) targets. In three experimental (and two supplemental) studies (total N = 914), we aimed at examining the cognitive processes underlying these findings under fully standardized conditions. To be able to dissect a-priori decision bias, biased information processing and motor preparation, we rendered video sequences of virtual avatars that differed in nothing but the tone of their skin. Modeling the data via drift diffusion models revealed that the threat of a social group can be explicitly learned and mapped accordingly on an a-priori response bias within the model (Study 1). Studies 2 and 3 replicated the racial shooter bias as apparent in faster reaction times in stereotype-consistent trials. This, however, appears to result from stereotype-consistent motoric preparations and execution readiness, but not from pre-judicial threat biases. The results have implications especially for automatic stereotypes in the public.

Oculomotor freezing tracks perception and is immune to decision bias

The appearance of a salient stimulus rapidly inhibits saccadic eye movements. Curiously, this "oculomotor freezing" reflex is triggered only by stimuli that the participant reports seeing (White & Rolfs, 2016). But is oculomotor freezing linked to the participant's sensory experience, or their decision that a stimulus was present? If it were decision-related, oculomotor freezing should become less prevalent when the participant is induced to have a conservative decision criterion and reports seeing a stimulus less often. Here we manipulated decision criterion in two ways: by adjusting monetary payoffs and stimulus probability in a detection task. These bias manipulations greatly affected participants' explicit reports but did not affect the degree to which microsaccades were inhibited by stimulus presence. In addition, the link between oculomotor freezing and explicit reports was stronger when the decision criterion was conservative rather than liberal. The simplest explanation is that conservative reports of stimulus presence are more often based on a strong sensory signal that also inhibits microsaccades. We conclude that the sensory threshold for oculomotor freezing is independent of decision bias. To the extent that conscious experience is also unaffected by such bias, oculomotor freezing provides an involuntary, implicit indication that a stimulus has entered awareness.