How environmental regularities affect people's information search in probability judgments from experience

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Janine Christin HoffartGilles Dutilh

Abstract

In everyday life, people encounter smaller rewards with higher probability than larger rewards. Do people expect this reward-probability regularity to hold in experimental settings? To answer this question, we tested whether people's behavior in probability judgment tasks is affected by the correlation between reward size and reward probabilities. In Study 1, we asked people to judge reward probabilities under uncertainty. In line with the ecological reward-probability correlation, people assumed that larger rewards were less likely than smaller rewards. In Study 2, we tested the prediction that people's information search and integration depend on the representativeness of the environment. Participants performed an experience-based probability judgment task in which they sampled outcomes from unknown gambles until they felt confident to estimate the probabilities of the gambles' outcomes. We manipulated the reward-probability relationship of the gambles in 3 experimental groups. Rewards and reward probabilities were negatively correlated, positively correlated, or not correlated at all. A negative correlation mimics the ecological reward-probability relationship often present in real life. We analyzed people's search effort an...Continue Reading

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