Article,
Information Presentation Constraints and the Adaptive Decision Maker Hypothesis
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 25 (2): 428--446 (March 1999)
DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.25.2.428
Abstract
Participants examined sets of apartments described along 4 dimensions. Attribute values were manipulated to provide a way to infer strategy from response patterns. Experiment 1 established baseline behavior in unconstrained search, whereas Experiments 2–4 constrained participants to search either by alternative or by dimension. Dimensionwise presentation resulted in higher accuracy and reduced looking times. In 3-alternative choice, there was no evidence that strategy use depended on constraint condition. Evidence for possible strategy differences across constraint conditions was found when either multiple judgments rather than a single choice had to be made or the number of alternatives was increased to 5. These results supported features of the adaptive decision maker hypothesis (J. W. Payne, J. R. Bettman, & E. J. Johnson, 1988) but suggested that strategy use is not always strongly linked to acquisition pattern.
