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Category: Project

Description: We study the effects of exogenous changes in attention on the decisions of participants. Specifically, we want to know whether we can causally manipulate the importance that participants allocate to lottery outcomes by changing their presentation duration. Participants will be asked to make a series of decisions involving risk. In each trial, participants decide whether to accept or reject a lottery that yields a positive (gain) or negative (loss) outcome with equal probability (i.e. resolved by a coin toss). Every trial presents different values for these outcomes. The study will employ a within-subject design in which the relative duration participants are exposed to the different lottery outcomes (gains vs. losses) are varied among multiple conditions. We will study how changes in the presentation of lottery outcomes impact on the decision process. Specifically, we will manipulate the following aspects of lottery presentation: The specific outcomes of the lotteries (gains/losses) will be presented sequentially, in alternation and potentially multiple times (depending on when subjects terminate this process). The presentation duration, order and position with which each outcome is presented will be varied from trial to trial. Participants choose whether to accept or reject the gambles without learning the actual outcomes of their choices until the end of the experiment. Our key dependent variables are the decision to accept the lottery, confidence in the decision and decision latency. We expect participants to assign a greater weight to outcomes that are presented for relatively longer periods of time, such that a relatively longer presentation of a gain relative to a loss should lead to an increase in lottery acceptance on that trial, with the opposite being true for losses.