Name: Ashley Lawrence-Huizenga

School of Psychology - Dissertation Proposal

Date: Friday, February 2, 2018

Time: 2:00 pm

Location: JS Coon bldg. 150

Advisor:

Rick Thomas, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Dissertation Committee Members:

Frank Durso, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Mark Wheeler, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Dan Spieler, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Paul Elmore, Ph.D. (Naval Research Laboratory)

Title: An Accessibility Framework for Cue-Based Inferences

Abstract:

Many studies throughout the area of decision-making have shown that people are able to adapt to different decision environments. A number of frameworks have been proposed that seek to explain adaptive decision making in the context of cue-based inferences, a type of decision where a person decides which option is highest on a variable of interest based on the attributes of those options. However, current frameworks fail to account for the role of memory in cue-based inferences. The goal of this dissertation is to test whether a framework based on the accessibility of cues in memory can provide a better account of adaptive decision-making in cue-based inferences than either the adaptive toolbox or current single-strategy models. Three experiments will be proposed to test the accessibility framework by manipulating decision environments as well as directly manipulation memory for cues. In general, the experiments are expected to show that apparently different strategies are the result of differences in memory accessibility. This will provide an important contribution to the literature because current frameworks do not provide fully-specified process accounts of how decision makers use cues to make decisions in this context.