Covert attention leads to fast and accurate decision making
Decision makers are regularly faced with more choice information than they can directly gaze at in a limited amount of time. Many theories assume that because decision makers attend to information sequentially and overtly that is, with direct gaze, they must respond to information overload by trading off between speed and decision accuracy. By re-analyzing four published studies, we show that participants, besides using overt attention, also use covert attention that is, attend to information without direct gaze, to evaluate choice attributes that lead them to either choose the best or reject the worst option. We show that the use of covert attention is common for most participants and more so when information is easily identifiable in the peripheral visual field due to being large or visually salient. Covert choices are associated with faster decision times suggesting that participants process multiple pieces of information simultaneously using distributed attention. Our findings highlight the importance of covert attention in decision making and show how decision makers may be gaining speed without sacrificing accuracy. We discuss implications of our findings for both existing and future theories of decision making.