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Consumers can make decisions in as little as a third of a second

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Milica Milosavljevic
Affiliation:
Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology
Christof Koch
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea
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Abstract

We make hundreds of decisions every day, many of them extremely quickly and without much explicit deliberation. This motivates two important open questions: What is the minimum time required to make choices with above chance accuracy? What is the impact of additional decision-making time on choice accuracy? We investigated these questions in four experiments in which subjects made binary food choices using saccadic or manual responses, under either “speed” or “accuracy” instructions. Subjects were able to make above chance decisions in as little as 313 ms, and choose their preferred food item in over 70% of trials at average speeds of 404 ms. Further, slowing down their responses by either asking them explicitly to be confident about their choices, or to respond with hand movements, generated about a 10% increase in accuracy. Together, these results suggest that consumers can make accurate every-day choices, akin to those made in a grocery store, at significantly faster speeds than previously reported.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
The authors license this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors [2011] This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Figure 0

Figure 1: Typical trial in Experiment 1

Figure 1

Figure 2: Reaction time distributions for Experiment 1, for correct trials = thick line, and error trials = thin line. Vertical line shows the mean MRT = 313 ms.

Figure 2

Table 1: Individual statistics for Experiment 1

Figure 3

Figure 3: (A) Percentage of correct choices as a function of liking rating differences between the two food items (1=most difficult choices, 4=easiest choices). (B) Mean reaction time at each value distance. Error bars denote SEM.

Figure 4

Table 2: Order of participation for each subject and experiment

Figure 5

Figure 4: Typical trial in Experiment 2.

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Figure 5: Reaction time distribution for Experiment 1 (blue line) vs. Experiment 2 (green line). Thick line = correct trials. Thin line = error trials. Vertical lines = the estimate of the mean Minimum Reaction Time across subjects: Experiment 1 = 313 ms; Experiment 2 = 114 ms.

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Table 3: Individual statistics for Experiment 2 and Experiment 1

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Figure 6: Reaction time distribution for Experiment 3 (red line) vs. Experiment 4 (gray line). Thick lines = correct trials. Thin lines = error trials. Vertical lines = the mean Minimum Reaction Time across subjects: Experiment 3 = 365 ms; Experiment 4 = 418 ms.

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Table 4: Individual statistics for Experiment 3

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Table 5: Individual statistics for Experiment 4

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Figure 7: Experiments 3 (dashed line) & 4 (solid line). (A) Percentage of correct trials as a function of liking rating differences between the two food items (1=most difficult choices, 4=easiest choices). (B) Mean reaction times for each value distance. Error bars denote SEM.

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Figure 8: (A) Comparison of Minimum RTs and Mean RTs in all experiments: Experiment1 = Speed; Experiment 2 = Control; Experiment 3 = Conf; Experiment 4 = Manual. (B) Mean Accuracy in all experiments. Error bars represent SEM.