Covert attention leads to fast and accurate decision-making

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Decision-makers are regularly faced with more choice information than they can directly gaze at in a limited amount of time. Many theories assume that because decision-makers attend to information sequentially and overtly, that is, with direct gaze, they must respond to information overload by trading off between speed and decision accuracy. By reanalyzing five published studies, we show that participants, besides using overt attention, also use covert attention. That is, without being instructed to do so, participants attend to information without direct gaze to evaluate choice attributes that lead them to either choose the best or reject theworst option. Weshow that the use of covert attention is common for most participants andmore sowhen information is easily identifiable in the peripheral visual field due to being large or visually salient. Covert attention is associated with faster decision times suggesting that participants might process multiple pieces of information simultaneously using distributed attention. Our findings highlight the importance of covert attention in decision-making and show how decision-makers may be gaining speed while retaining high levels of decision accuracy.We discuss how harnessing covert attention can benefit consumer decision-making of healthy and sustainable products

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)78-94
Number of pages17
JournalJournal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
Volume29
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 5 May 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85130602744
Mendeley 580ca678-4acd-3c6f-98b6-adc46e423336
WOS 000790485700001
ORCID /0000-0002-2531-4175/work/142240721

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • Decision-making, Covert attention, Peripheral vision, Consumer choice, Eye tracking, covert attention, decision-making, eye tracking, peripheral vision, consumer choice

Library keywords