David Shanks University College London, UK.ppt

David Shanks University College London, UK * Learning and Decision Making: An Overview of the Landscape General theme: How do people learn to make good choices in decision environments? What are the main research questions in studying decision learning? What factors affect the likelihood of learning an optimal decision strategy? cue 1 cue 2 cue 3 cue 4 outcome eg medical symptoms?diseases, weather?price of orange juice, company data stock?market changes, etc. Participants receive a payoff for each correct decision or for their overall decision accuracy. choice FTSE/Nasdaq? FTSE which company’s shares are more likely to increase? Bulk of operations? UK Established company? No Employee turnover? Low FTSE/Nasdaq? Nasdaq Bulk of operations? US Established company? No Employee turnover? High Company A Company B What research questions arise in the study of decision learning? Search: How do we find and/or construct the cues and cue values necessary for informing our choices? Integration: How do we combine cue information? linear/nonlinear, heuristics How do different forms of feedback and feedforward affect decision learning? What form does knowledge take? connections, exemplars, prototypes, rules To what extent do people have insight into their decisions? Can people learn to make optimal decisions? If not, what sort of biases are they prone to? Search: How do we find the cues and cue values necessary for informing our choices? Very little research on discovering/constructing cues… Klayman (1988): discovery is heavily reliant on outcome feedback much better when the person can intervene and design his/her own experiments. More research on search amongst available cues, eg process tracing techniques (elimination by aspects, satisficing). Stopping rule: when should we stop searching for additional cue information? How do we choose how to allocate our attention across cues? Integration: How do we combine cue information? Linear/nonlinear Heuristics Peo