Sequential sampling models of choice: Some recent advances

Abstract

Choice models in marketing and economics are generally derived without specifying the underlying cognitive process of decision making. This approach has been successfully used to predict choice behavior. However, it has not much to say about such aspects of decision making as deliberation, attention, conflict, and cognitive limitations and how these influence choices. In contrast, sequential sampling models developed in cognitive psychology explain observed choices based on assumptions about cognitive processes that return the observed choice as the terminal state. We illustrate three advantages of this perspective. First, making explicit assumptions about underlying cognitive processes results in measures of deliberation, attention, conflict, and cognitive limitation. Second, the mathematical representations of underlying cognitive processes imply well documented departures from Luce's Choice Axiom such as the similarity, compromise, and attraction effects. Third, the process perspective predicts response time and thus allows for inference based on observed choices and response times. Finally, we briefly discuss the relationship between these cognitive models and rules for statistically optimal decisions in sequential designs. KeywordsLuce's axiom, choice models, diffusion models, race models, human information, processing, response time, optimal decision making, likelihood based inference Choice models in marketing and economics are generally derived without specifying the underlying cognitive process of decision making. This approach has been successfully used to predict choice behavior. However, it has not much to say about such aspects of decision making as deliberation, attention, conflict, and cognitive limitations and how these influence choices. In contrast, sequential sampling models developed in cognitive psychology explain observed choices based on assumptions about cognitive processes that return the observed choice as the terminal state. We illustrate three advantages of this perspective. First, making explicit assumptions about underlying cognitive processes results in measures of deliberation, attention, conflict, and cognitive limitation. Second, the mathematical representations of underlying cognitive processes imply well documented departures from Luce's Choice Axiom such as the similarity, compromise, and attraction effects. Third, the process perspective predicts response time and thus allows for inference based on observed choices and response times. Finally, we briefly discuss the relationship between these cognitive models and rules for statistically optimal decisions in sequential designs.

Do Preference Reversals Disappear When We Allow for Probabilistic Choice?

“…In the context of perceptual decisions, such processes have been modelled as sequential sampling/accumulation of evidence (see Otter et al 2008 for a review). Busemeyer and Townsend's (1993) decision field theory is an early example of such an approach being applied to preference tasks where decisions are seen as the end result of a deliberative process.…”

Sampling and assessment accuracy in mate choice: A random-walk model of information processing in mating decision

“…This model shares important features with a class of random-walk models, known in psychological literature as sequential-sampling models, which have been developed to study how humans make decisions (Busemeyer and Townsend 1993;Smith and Ratcliff 2004) and which have been recently introduced in neurobiology to explain the neural basis of decision making (Bogacz 2007;Gold and Shadlen 2007). The term "sequential-sampling", first adopted by cognitive psychologists to describe these models (Townsend and Ashby 1983;review in Gold and Shadlen 2007;Otter et al 2008), does not refer to the sampling mechanism of prospective mates (that is, comparative versus sequential search), but to the mechanism of decision making (the sequential integration of noisy sensory information over time until a bound is reached). In the present paper, to prevent semantic confusion, we abandon the term "sequential-sampling", which in behavioural ecology is often used as synonymous of sequential mate choice (Real 1990), and use the term "random-walk" that better describe the stochastic process of information gathering during simultaneous evaluation of prospective mates.…”

The Presence of Real Food Usurps Hypothetical Health Value Judgment in Overweight People

“…We note that, compared with the hypothetical scanner condition, in the buffet, participants were not constrained by limited time to make choices, and were also in a hungrier state, all of which could have been factors that contributed to a change in health valuation in the real condition. Such an account is in line with sequential sampling models of decision-making, which describe valuation as a sequential process in which the recollection of new information or a change in conditions can gradually modify the initial value estimate (Otter et al, 2008). Overall then, the betweengroup difference in food choices in the real versus the hypothetical condition, which we observed here, could reflect group differences in health valuation across the two conditions, as well as differences in the implicit motivation for food, and the extent to which trait impulsivity manifests in the presence of food.…”