Complex economic decisions from simple neurocognitive processes: the role of interactive attention

Abstract

Neurocognitive theories of value-based choice propose that people additively accumulate choice attributes when making decisions. These theories cannot explain the emergence of complex multiplicative preferences such as those assumed by prospect theory and other economic models. We investigate an interactive attention mechanism, according to which attention to attributes (like payoffs) depends on other attributes (like probabilities) attended to previously. We formalize this mechanism using a Markov attention model combined with an accumulator decision process, and test our model on eye-tracking and mouse-tracking data in risky choice. Our tests show that interactive attention is necessary to make good choices, that most participants display interactive attention and that allowing for interactive attention in accumulation-based decision models improves their predictions. By equipping established decision models with sophisticated attentional dynamics, we extend these models to describe complex economic choice, and in the process, we unify two prominent theoretical approaches to studying value-based decision making.