Abstract
Does taxing cognitive resources improve people’s choices in repeated binary prediction? Wolford, Newman, Miller, and Wig (2004, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 221–228) found that a secondary verbal working memory task, which competed for cognitive resources with a repeated binary choice task, steered participants toward adopting the optimal strategy, namely, probability maximizing. By contrast, under single-task conditions, an inferior strategy prevailed, namely, probability matching. We conducted a preregistered direct replication of Experiment 1 in Wolford et al. (2004) with a sample of participants more than 5 times larger than the original sample. We did not find a statistically significant effect of cognitive load on strategy selection in repeated binary choice. Moreover, in many cases, Bayesian analyses, which were performed in addition to conventional methods of null hypothesis significance testing, yielded substantial evidence in favor of the absence of cognitive load effects on choice behavior. Thus, we found no reliable support for the claim that taxing cognitive resources leads to improved decision-making in repeated binary prediction.
Highlights
Does taxing cognitive resources improve people’s choices in repeated binary prediction? Wolford, Newman, Miller, and Wig (2004, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 221–228) found that a secondary verbal working memory task, which competed for cognitive resources with a repeated binary choice task, steered participants toward adopting the optimal strategy, namely, probability maximizing
Proverbial wisdom suggests that Bto do two things at once is to do neither.^1 Yet in simple binary prediction, people’s choices have been found to improve when an additional task is introduced that competes for cognitive resources (Wolford, Newman, Miller, & Wig, 2004)
They reasoned that the n-back task selectively taxes the cognitive resources needed for vigilant pattern search and undercuts this behavior
Summary
Does taxing cognitive resources improve people’s choices in repeated binary prediction? Wolford, Newman, Miller, and Wig (2004, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 221–228) found that a secondary verbal working memory task, which competed for cognitive resources with a repeated binary choice task, steered participants toward adopting the optimal strategy, namely, probability maximizing. Proverbial wisdom suggests that Bto do two things at once is to do neither.^1 Yet in simple binary prediction, people’s choices have been found to improve when an additional task is introduced that competes for cognitive resources (Wolford, Newman, Miller, & Wig, 2004). Wolford et al (2004) interpreted these results as supporting the view that probability matching arises from a search for patterns in the (random) outcome sequence. They reasoned that the n-back task selectively taxes the cognitive resources needed for vigilant pattern search and undercuts this behavior (the visual-spatial task was assumed to tax cognitive functions not involved in pattern search). Establishing the replicability of the original results is an important contribution to the debate on the causes of probability matching and the conditions under which it is more or less likely to occur
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