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"Choice and consequence in eye movements and beyond" Amelia Hunt (Aberdeen)

Deciding how to allocate one’s attention when faced with multiple competing goals is a dilemma we all face in daily life. These decisions can have serious consequences — for example, in splitting your attention while driving. An important factor that should weigh into such a decision is the limitations of your own abilities. That is, if you have adequate skill and the tasks are not too demanding, you can complete multiple tasks in a given time interval. but if the tasks are difficult, you should focus all your efforts on completing one task. Using eye movements as a starting point, we observe that people fail to take the strengths and limitations of their own visual acuity into account when deciding where to look to detect a target that could appear in multiple possible locations. We extend this conclusion beyond eye movements into two other tasks (throwing and memorization), and show that the results cannot be accounted for by a lack of accurate information about one’s own probability of success given their level of skill and the set of possible decisions that person could make. We also find that experience and training have a severely limited ability to improve decision efficiency in these tasks. The results reveal surprising shortcomings in human decisions. I will speculate on the decision rules and biases that could lead to inefficient decisions in the specific situations in which we have observed them.