Continuous process tracing and the Iowa Gambling Task: Extending response dynamics to multialternative choice

The history of judgment and decision making is defined by a trend toward increasingly nuanced explanations of the decision making process. Recently, process models have become incredibly sophisticated, yet the tools available to directly test these models have not kept pace. These increasingly compl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gregory J. Koop, Joseph G. Johnson
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Society for Judgment and Decision Making 2011-12-01
Series:Judgment and Decision Making
Subjects:
Online Access:http://journal.sjdm.org/11/m29/m29.pdf
Description
Summary:The history of judgment and decision making is defined by a trend toward increasingly nuanced explanations of the decision making process. Recently, process models have become incredibly sophisticated, yet the tools available to directly test these models have not kept pace. These increasingly complex process models require increasingly complex process data by which they can be adequately tested. We propose a new class of data collection that will facilitate evaluation of sophisticated process models. Tracking mouse paths during a continuous response provides an implicit measure of the growth of preference that produces a choice---rather than the current practice of recording just the button press that indicates that choice itself. Recent research in cognitive science (Spivey and Dale, 2006) has shown that cognitive processing can be revealed in these dynamic motor responses. Unlike current process methodologies, these response dynamics studies can demonstrate continuous competition between choice options and even online preference reversals. Here, in order to demonstrate the mechanics and utility of the methodology, we present an example response dynamics experiment utilizing a common multi-alternative decision task.
ISSN:1930-2975