Gray, W. D., Schoelles, M. J., & Myers, C. W. (2004). Strategy constancy amidst implementation differences: Interaction-intensive versus memory-intensive adaptations to information access in decision-making. In K. D. Forbus, D. Gentner & T. Regier (Eds.), 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci2004. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publisher.
Over the last two decades attempts to quantify decision-making have established
that, under a wide range of conditions, people trade-off effectiveness for
efficiency in the strategies they adopt. However, as interesting, significant,
and influential as this research has been, its scope is limited by three
factors; the coarseness of how effort was measured, the confounding of the
costs of steps in the decision-making algorithm with the costs of steps in
a given task environment, and the static nature of the decision tasks studied.
In the current study, we embedded a decision-making task in a dynamic task
environment and varied the cost required for the information access step.
Across three conditions, small changes in the cost of interactive behavior
led to changes in the strategy adopted for decision-making as well as to
differences in how a step in the same strategy was implemented.