In this project the Principal Investigator (PI) will study decision making phenomena that emerge from situations in which the explicit description of outcomes and probabilities is not available (i.e., Decisions from Experience, DFE). The PI will determine how Prospect Theory and other models of choice under risk may or may not account for human behavior in DFE situations. The PI will also examine the ability of an Instance-Based Learning model ( IBL) derived from the ACT-R theory of cognition (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) to account for behavior in DFE. The performance of this model will also be examined in two new domains: First by considering decisions from experience in dynamic environments, and second by investigating the effects of decisions from experience in situations involving more than one person. In terms of broader impacts, this research will expand our knowledge of human behavior in the naturalistic situations in which we use our experience to make decisions. The research investigates situations where people have the opportunity to sample options before making decisions for real and also situations where they are forced to make consequential decisions without exploring the options. These types of situations arise frequently in Engineering, Business, and Medicine. The research will also result in concrete experimental tools and computational models to be made available to the academic and research community.
