School of Psychology Colloquium 11/8 3:00 pm JS Coon 250

Professor Rick Thomas “The Critical Role of Memory in Judgement and Decision-Making”

Abstract
The theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM; G. Gigerenzer, U. Hoffrage, & H. Kleinbolting, 1991) has had a major influence on the field of judgment and decision making, with the most recent important modifications to PMM theory being the identification of several fast and frugal (F&F) heuristics (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996). Although the F&F heuristics have been studied extensively and are purported to provide psychologically plausible cognitive process models that describe a variety of decision behavior, we have argued the underlying assumptions of PMM/F&F are psychologically implausible (Dougherty, Franco-Watkins, & Thomas, 2008; Dougherty, Thomas, & Franco-Watkins, 2008). In this talk, I advance a memory-based theory of how cues are generated and used in inference as an alternative to the concept of pre-computed cue hierarchies advanced by PMM/F&F. Specifically, the new theory integrates the F&F heuristics with HyGene, a memory-based model of how decision makers generate and evaluate hypotheses (Thomas, Dougherty, & Buttaccio, 2014, Thomas, Dougherty, Sprenger, & Harbison, 2008). Using archival data in which memory retrieval variables were not directly manipulated and data from two recent experiments that directly manipulated memory retrieval variables (cue frequency and serial position), it is demonstrated that participants’ cue selection behavior is consistent with memory-based retrieval (Lawrence, Thomas, & Dougherty, in press). The HyGene model provided the best account of the empirical data compared to PMM/F&F, providing further evidence for the critical role of memory in judgment and decision making.

Reception to follow in JS Coon 2nd Floor Atrium