11:00 - 12:30
Parallel sessions 8
11:00 - 12:30
Room: HSZ - N2
Chair/s:
Jennifer March, Nuno Busch
What do I want to eat, which item do I want to purchase, and in which stocks should I invest? We make countless decisions every day, but our preferences are typically not stable: They often fluctuate strongly across different contexts and depend heavily on our internal states. This symposium aims to shed light on how decisions are affected across different contexts and states. The contribution by Tibor Stöffel will highlight nutrition as an important factor influencing decision-making. In his talk, he disentangles how different macro-nutritional compositions differentially affect the valuation system in the brain, leading to nutrition-dependent levels of loss aversion in risky choice. In the second talk, Nuno Busch reveals that loss aversion in risky decision-making can also be modulated by the degree of explicit information available about the choice options, and by how we learn about them (i.e., from description or from own experience). In the third talk, Jennifer March will present the mechanisms that give rise to contextual influences on food-related decision making. Specifically, she will demonstrate how subjective values of food options and subsequent choice are altered when presented in bundles. In the fourth talk, Barbara Oberbauer will reveal to what extent search patterns differ depending on the decision goal (i.e., choose the most preferred item vs assess the overall value). Moreover, she will show how the possibility of postponing a decision (i.e., choice deferral) affects search patterns and subsequent choice. The effects of goals on choice also play an important role in the final talk of the symposium, wherein Chih-Chung Ting will demonstrate that flexible decision-making relies on goal-dependent value representations. Together, the symposium combines a diverse range of methodologies, including nutritional manipulations, fMRI, eye-tracking, and state-of-the-art cognitive modelling, to illuminate the contextual nature of choice. The symposium features a multi-ethnic team of female and male speakers at different career stages from three universities across two countries offering rich perspectives and expertise in experimental psychology related to human decision-making. 
Submission 299
The Cognitive Mechanisms of Choice Deferral
SymposiumTalk-05
Presented by: Barbara Oberbauer
Barbara Oberbauer 1, Yi-Hsin Su 2, Amitai Shenhav 2, Sebastian Gluth 1
1 University of Hamburg, Germany
2 UC Berkeley, United States
Contrary to the decision-making behavior that is typically studied in the lab, in many real-world settings individuals are not forced to choose but rather have the possibility to defer decisions to a later point in time. However, the cognitive processes underlying choice deferral remain poorly understood. Two concurrent frameworks describe choice deferral either as (1) a choice process that is prematurely terminated as individuals fail to single out the best option or (2) as an appraisal process in which decisions are deferred if the overall value of all choice options is low.

We aim at elucidating the cognitive process of choice deferral by comparing the similarity of visual search patterns between choice deferral and choice as well as appraisal, thereby leveraging our knowledge about visual search and overall value in choice and appraisal to investigate how people make decisions when having the opportunity to defer.

Participants are asked to evaluate sets of previously rated consumer products under three conditions: (1) selecting the most preferred item, (2) assessing the overall value of the set, and (3) choosing their most preferred item with the option to defer while gaze was recorded through eye-tracking. Importantly, participants are required to complete choice trials that they have initially deferred at the end of the experiment.

We compare search patterns across tasks using representational similarity analysis (RSA) and explore whether search patterns in choice deferral are more similar to choice or appraisal, thereby adding important insights about shared cognitive processes across these tasks.