| Summary: | Decisions that
consumers make often rest on evaluations of attributes, such as how large,
expensive, good, or fattening an option seems. Extant research has demonstrated
that these evaluations in turn depend upon the recently experienced
distribution of attribute values (e.g., positively or negatively skewed). In
many situations decisions rely on recalling the attribute values of each
option, a process that has been neglected in much of the previous literature.
In two experiments, participants learned attribute information for labeled
stimuli presented within either a positively or negatively skewed distribution
and then they recalled values from labels after approximately one minute. The
results demonstrated effects that are inconsistent with predictions of the
category-adjustment model (Duffy, Huttenlocher, Hedges & Crawford, 2010) that
recalled values would shift toward the mean of the distribution of values
presented. Instead, results were consistent with predictions of the
comparison-induced distortion model (Choplin & Hummel, 2002) that remembered
values would depend on the density of stimuli within the attribute range.
Reasons for these results, alternative models, and implications for
decision-making are discussed. % changed with to within
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