Pillars of judgment : how memory abilities, task feedback, and cognitive load guide judgment strategies
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Making judgments is an essential part of everyday life and how people form a \njudgment has instigated a plethora of research. Research in judgment and categorization has \nparticularly contrasted two types of judgment strategies: rule-based and similarity-based \nstrategies. Recent research suggests that people can make use of both rule- and similaritybased \nstrategies and frequently shift between these strategies. To select between strategies, \ncontingency approaches propose that people trade off the strategies’ accuracy against the \neffort needed to execute strategy so that the selected strategy matches the demands of the task \nenvironment and the capabilities of the decision maker. This dissertation presents three papers \ninvestigating how accuracy-effort trade-offs between rule-based and similarity-based \njudgment strategies change strategy selection in judgment and categorization tasks. \nThe first paper studies how reducing working memory by imposing a cognitive load \nmay foster shifts to a less demanding similarity-based strategy and, in turn, enhances \njudgment performance in tasks well solved by a similarity-based strategy, but not in tasks for \nwhich rules are better suited. The second paper compares judgment strategies to strategies \npeople apply in categorization. It shows that the same task characteristics, namely the number \nof cues and the functional relationship between cues and criterion, foster shifts between rulebased \nand similarity-based strategies in judgment and categorization. The third manuscript \nexplores which memory abilities underlie rule-based and similarity-based judgments. \nSpecifically, it shows that working memory predicts to a stronger degree how well people \nsolve rule-based judgment tasks, whereas episodic memory is more closely linked to \njudgment performance in similarity-based tasks. Furthermore, episodic memory also predicts \nselecting a similarity-based strategy, but not working memory.
Source: edoc (University of Basel)
Author: Hoffmann, Janina Anna
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1602026450