Abstract
When choosing between options, such as food items presented in plain view, people tend to choose the option they spend longer looking at. The prevailing interpretation is that visual attention increases value. However, in previous studies, 'value' was coupled to a behavioural goal, since subjects had to choose the item they preferred. This makes it impossible to discern if visual attention has an effect on value, or, instead, if attention modulates the information most relevant for the goal of the decision-maker. Here, we present the results of two independent studies-a perceptual and a value-based task-that allow us to decouple value from goal-relevant information using specific task-framing. Combining psychophysics with computational modelling, we show that, contrary to the current interpretation, attention does not boost value, but instead it modulates goal-relevant information. This work provides a novel and more general mechanism by which attention interacts with choice.
Highlights
How is value constructed and what is the role played by visual attention in choice? Despite their centrality to the understanding of human decision-making, these remain unanswered questions
Since the last fixation is in general followed by the participant response, one could suspect that the goal-dependent modulation of attention (i.e. difference in dwelling time (DDT)) we identified in our choice regression analysis (Figure 2) is entirely driven by the final fixation
This would be problematic since one would have similar results to the one presented in Figure 2 even if participants’ pattern of attention is not modulated by the goal or even if the pattern of fixation, before the last fixation, is random. To control for this possibility, we performed a series of further analyses: First of all, we repeated the analysis presented in the previous section, removing the last two fixations when calculating the DDT
Summary
How is value constructed and what is the role played by visual attention in choice? Despite their centrality to the understanding of human decision-making, these remain unanswered questions. How attention interacts with value-based choice has been investigated in psychology and neuroscience (Krajbich et al, 2010; Krajbich and Rangel, 2011; Cavanagh et al, 2014; Polanıa et al, 2014; Gluth et al, 2015; Gluth et al, 2020; Folke et al, 2017; Tavares et al, 2017; Glickman et al, 2018; Gluth et al, 2018; Thomas et al, 2019) and this question is at the core of the theory of rational inattention in economics (Sims, 2003; Sims, 2010; Caplin and Dean, 2015; Hebert and Woodford, 2017). This intuition has been elegantly formalised using models of sequential sampling, in particular the attentional drift diffusion model (aDDM), which considers that visual attention boosts the drift rate of the stochastic accumulation processes (Krajbich et al, 2010)
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