Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for November, 2018

Lena Nadarevic

Lena Nadarevic, University of Mannheim, visits this week to speak in the SWE Colloquium. Below, she outlines what she will be covering.

On the stability and malleability of the truth effect

Studies on the repetition-based truth effect suggest that people provide higher truth judgments to statements they have encountered before than to novel statements. Since its first empirical demonstration, the truth effect has been replicated many times and seems to be a remarkably stable phenomenon. For instance, the effect has been found with various statement types and does not depend on the statements’ presentation format (visual versus auditory). In my presentation, however, I will not only talk about the stability of the truth effect, but also about its malleability. More precisely, I will present truth effect studies that have identified several relevant moderator variables. Moreover, I will talk about the theoretical implications of the reported findings.

berufsfelder – occupations

One of the University of Basel Unirat members has recently noted (in a visit to our Faculty) that it may be important to give future students a good idea of the diverse applications of psychology because psychotherapy may still be the modal category in mind when considering studying psychology (it actually represents only a portion of what psychologists actually do these days – see this old post).

The German Psychological Association seems to have a similar idea in mind and developed a few videos to give future psychology students an idea about the different areas of psychology (such the video above) that could be quite useful in this regard – you can find more of these here.

New publication on the interplay of attention and decision making

In this work, we sought to resolve a current debate on the influence of a third (distractor) option on the probability of choosing the better out of two other alternatives. One study reported that more valuable distractors make it more difficult to pick the best option (Louie et al., 2013, PNAS), but another study found just the opposite (Chau et al., 2014, Nature Neuroscience). In four experiments with a total of 147 participants, we used the paradigm of Chau and colleagues, added a specific set of trials, manipulated decision time, measured eye movements, and applied cognitive modeling to make sense of this controversy.

Remarkably, we neither found a positive nor a negative effect of the distractor’s value on the relative probability of choosing the best or the second-best option. Instead, better distractors were chosen more often themselves (even though participants were instructed not to pick them) and slowed down the choice process, thereby leading to longer response times and more failures to stay within the time limit. The best explanation for these effects was that the amount of attention spent on the distractor increased with its value. This was confirmed by eye-tracking data (see the figure): Participants looked more on high-value distractors (D), which made it more difficult for them to choose accurately. Finally, we analyzed the behavioral data of Chau and colleagues and found out that their effect resulted from a statistical artifact. Our study highlights the role of attention in speeded decision making as well as the importance of testing the robustness of previously published results.

Gluth, S.*, Spektor, M.S.*, & Rieskamp, J. (2018). Value-based attentional capture affects multi-alternative decision making. eLife, 7, e39659.

16th Annual Meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics

The 2018 meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics was hosted over three days in early October by the Wharton School at the University of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a warm-up to the main event, the Consumer Neuroscience Satellite Symposium is another increasingly popular platform for scientific communication and exchange the day before the start of the main conference. A few of us – Sebastian Gluth, Regina Weilbächer, Peter Krämer, Laura Fontanesi, Loreen Tisdall – made the trip to the US East Coast to attend the symposium and/or conference, and present some of the projects we are working on (see conference contributions below).

As in previous years, the conference featured topical sessions (e.g., ‘Intertemporal Decision Making and Self-Control’, ‘Valuation and Choice’), poster sessions, poster spotlights, workshops, the Fred Kavli Plenary Lecture (Alex Kacelnik, ‘Choice and value: The biology of decision making’), and of course plenty of opportunity to network. Interestingly, several workshops focused on big data and online testing: Robb Rutledge for example presented the Great Brain Experiment, an app that gamifies experiments on risk, memory, attention, and impulsivity and is allowing researcher to collect large datasets (n > 10,000).

Regrettably, very few talks focused on methodological issues in neuroeconomics. An exception was the best voted talk: “The space of decision models
” by Sudeep Bhatia. In this talk, Bathia presented a method to look at commonalities between the many proposed decision making models (he considered 157 of them), based on their explanatory power and complexity.

A very welcome break away from previous meetings was that quite a few talks were given by early career researchers. Anecdotally, we noticed a worrying trend, namely, that NeuroEconomists do not like apples: A number of talks focused on decisions that involved healthy but bad-tasting apples, versus unhealthy but yummy doughnuts. More data is needed to draw firm conclusions on the link between research topic and taste perception.

This year’s Cocktail Reception was hosted at the Penn Museum’s Egypt Gallery, where presumably the less formal atmosphere led to a wide range of discussions, including the (ethical) use of animals in research, the neural mechanisms underlying prosopagnosia, and individuals’ preferences for burial over cremation … something for everyone. The subsequent journey to the south side of town for famous Philly cheese steak, in contrast, was not for everyone, but an experience nevertheless. 

Next year’s meeting will be in Dublin, Ireland, and we look forward to learning more about ongoing research in NeuroEconomics. As a direct outcome of the meeting, Laura and Loreen will join the ‘Neuroimaging Analysis Replication and Prediction Study’ … stay tuned for further details. 

—- Blog post co-authored by Laura Fontanesi and Loreen Tisdall —-

Fontanesi, L., Gluth, S., Rieskamp, J., & Forstmann, B. (2018). The role of dopaminergic midbrain nuclei in predicting monetary gains and losses: Who’s doing what? Paper presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Gluth, S., & Meiran, N. (2018). Linking trial-by-trial variability in computational models to neural data via Leave-One-Trial-Out (LOTO). Poster presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Kraemer, P., Fontanesi, L., Spektor, M., & Gluth, S. (2018). How response time analysis aides model selection in memory-based decisions. Poster presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Tisdall, L., Frey, R., Horn, A., Ostwald, D., Horvath, L., Pedroni, A., Blankenburg, F., Rieskamp, J., Hertwig, R., & Mata, R. (2018). The risky brain: Local morphometry and degree centrality as neural markers of psychometrically-derived risk preference factors. Poster presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Weilbaecher, R., Rieskamp, J., Krajbich, I., & Gluth, S. (2018). Is attention mediating the memory bias in preferential choice? Poster presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

 

Antoine Bommier

This week our  SWE colloquium speaker is Antoine Bommier, Chair of Integrative Risk Management and Economics, ETH Zürich

Considerations on risk and time preferences: about recursive preferences, household finance and the value of life

In this presentation, the speaker will outline, in a non-technical way, the main features of some research he has developed on risk and time preferences during his career before moving on to discuss specific points developed in his paper “Household finance, recursive preferences and the value of life” (co-authored with Daniel Harenberg and François LeGrand).