Variability and accessibility of information guide gaze dynamics in decision making.

Abstract

Experimental research in decision making often relies on tasks that provide participants with all the information they need to make their decisions. Here, we consider the process by which decision makers seek information about their choice alternatives when it is not immediately provided. Recent advances in computational theories have proposed that people will seek to process more information about options for which they are less certain about the value. Specifically, they will allocate more attention to options with lower certainty in order to increase their certainty by processing additional information. We tested this hypothesis with a behavioral and eye-tracking experiment in which participants observed pairs of random streams of numerical stimuli and were incentivized to report which streams were generated by the distributions with the greater means. We induced uncertainty by manipulating the variance of the value distribution for each option. In addition, we randomly replaced some of the stimuli with meaningless letters. This decreased the accessibility of information about the options. The results show that people fixate more on options with lower accessibility and to a lesser extent options with greater value. Interestingly, this pattern changes across response time, with early fixations driven by variability and accessibility, and late fixations driven by value and accessibility. Moreover, people were more likely to choose options with greater accessibility, and they felt more confident about their choices when accessibility was greater. This research could help illuminate the process of information seeking to reduce uncertainty during choice deliberation.