Cueing Backwards: Attention Processes In Multi-Attribute Choices

Marketers are naturally interested in biasing purchase decision in their favor. This can either be achieved bottom-up, biasing the choice between different alternatives, or top-down, influencing the decision-making process, e.g. which decision strategy is applied. The following series of experiments explores one backward cueing method that aims at directing attention to memorized information to influence the choice and the decision strategy applied. Decision making in multi-attribute choices is flexible, adaptive and varies between individuals. For example, one key feature that allows to discriminate between different decision-making processes is whether compensatory or non-compensatory strategies are applied (Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999). Compensatory means that less valid cues can overwrite cues of higher validity, contrarily non-compensatory means that more valid cues cannot be overwritten by less valid cues. Several factors in the environment have been proposed to influence the decision making process (Bröder & Schiffer, 2003; Rieskamp & Otto, 2011)namely Structural Modeling (SM. Even without feedback and training, the environment, such as the distribution of the validity of the information influences which strategy is applied (Krefeld-Schwalb, Donkin, Newell, & Scheibehenne, 2018; Mata, Schooler, & Rieskamp, 2011)”ISBN” : “9780199894727”, “ISSN” : “0882-7974”, “PMID” : “18179298”, “abstract” : “Are older adults’ decision abilities fundamentally compromised by age-related cognitive decline? Or can they adaptively select decision strategies? One study (N = 163. Recently it was suggested that one of the driving forces behind the adaptation of decision making are attentional processes. Spatial cueing single attributes in a multi-attribute choice task, increased the influence of these attributes on the choice (Platzer, Bröder, & Heck, 2014). Cueing spatial locations of a previously presented information increases visual attention to this position and the likelihood that this information is retrieved from memory (Souza & Oberauer, 2016), even for verbal material (Krefeld-Schwalb, 2018) and if the cue does not contain retrieval-relevant information (Scholz, Klichowicz, & Krems, 2018). But not only memory retrieval may be biased toward cued options, but also choices and the applied decision-strategies are influenced by the cued information (Platzer et al., 2014; Renkewitz & Jahn, 2012). Beyond influencing the weight of single attributes, Platzer and colleagues (2014) suggested that cueing influences directly the decision strategy applied. Their results show that cueing valid information supports the use of non-compensatory strategies, whilst cueing less valid information increases the motivation to search for more information in memory, and thus the use of compensatory decision strategies.