Abstract
Recently, Diederich and Busemeyer (2006) evaluated three hypotheses formulated as particular versions of a sequential-sampling model to account for the effects of payoffs in a perceptual decision task with time constraints. The bound-change hypothesis states that payoffs affect the distance of the starting position of the decision process to each decision bound. The drift-rate-change hypothesis states that payoffs affect the drift rate of the decision process. The two-stage-processing hypothesis assumes two processes, one for processing payoffs and another for processing stimulus information, and that on a given trial, attention switches from one process to the other. The latter hypothesis gave the best account of their data. The present study investigated two questions: (1) Does the experimental setting influence decisions, and consequently affect the fits of the hypotheses? A task was conducted in two experimental settings—either the time limit or the payoff matrix was held constant within a given block of trials, using three different payoff matrices and four different time limits—in order to answer this question. (2) Could it be that participants neglect payoffs on some trials and stimulus information on others? To investigate this idea, a further hypothesis was considered, the mixture-of-processes hypothesis. Like the two-stage-processing hypothesis, it postulates two processes, one for payoffs and another for stimulus information. However, it differs from the previous hypothesis in assuming that on a given trial exactly one of the processes operates, never both. The present design had no effect on choice probability but may have affected choice response times (RTs). Overall, the two-stage-processing hypothesis gave the best account, with respect both to choice probabilities and to observed mean RTs and mean RT patterns within a choice pair.
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This research was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Grant Di 506/8-3.
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Diederich, A. A further test of sequential-sampling models that account for payoff effects on response bias in perceptual decision tasks. Perception & Psychophysics 70, 229–256 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/PP.70.2.229
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PP.70.2.229