Selective Integration: An Attentional Theory of Choice Biases and Adaptive Choice

Human choice behavior shows a range of puzzling anomalies. Even simple binary choices are modified by accept/reject framing and by the presence of decoy options, and they can exhibit circular (i.e., intransitive) patterns of preferences. Each of these phenomena is incompatible with many standard models of choice but may provide crucial clues concerning the elementary mental processes underpinning our choices. One promising theoretical account proposes that choice-related information is selectively gathered through an attentionally limited window favoring goal-consistent information. We review research showing attentional-mediated choice biases and present a computationally explicit model—selective integration—that accounts for these biases.

An attentional theory of issue-carrying capacity

A plethora of research in cognitive and behavioral psychology showed that there are significant differences in the way men and women process political and social information. It has been widely accepted that women show more social concern for and tend to be more reactive to the problems in their social environments. The potential implications of these distinct cognitive styles, however, have received scant academic attention in political science research. In particular, we have scant knowledge of the extent to which differing cognitive styles affect the scope of problem identification and prioritization. Integrating insights from both political behavior and psychology research, this dissertation argues that women's lower cognitive threshold of urgency for societal issues should have important political implications. More specifically, argue that, compared with their male counterparts, female decision makers should attend to a wider variety of societal issues facing their country. My empirical strategy is two-fold. First, with over 930,000 respondents over the past 75 years in the US, I undertake the most comprehensive test of gender differences in issue attention and show that such differences are much stronger than previously thought and invariant across time. Second, utilizing the European Election Study surveys conducted in 12 European countries (N=13,549), 94 nationally representative surveys conducted between 1960 and 2015 in the US (N=110,796), and original datasets of legislative speeches from Turkey, I test the argument that women differ from men in the scope of societal issues with which they are involved and find strong empirical evidence for it. Results show that women do indeed attend to a broader range of issues when asked about the most important problems facing their country and speak about a wider range of issues in legislatures, a finding that is insensitive to various alternative model specifications and robustness tests.

Balint’s Syndrome and the Study of Attention

Balint’s syndrome is the most severe neuropsychological disorder affecting spatial attention that has been observed. In humans, it can be observed after bilateral occipital-parietal damage. The signs and symptoms of this syndrome are first described and then discussed in terms of how research with patients with Balint’s syndrome has helped and/or limited our understanding of object-based attention, visual search, and feature binding in visual perception. The findings have also supported the existence of implicit spatial maps that are available in the face of severely limited conscious spatial awareness. The results of such studies have led to advancements in attentional theory, especially as related to spatial attention and its interaction with object perception.

Context-switch effect produced by the ambiguity of the meaning of a cue

One experiment analyzed whether context dependency of a flavor-illness association depends on the extinction of a different flavor-illness association in rats. There were two sessions per day, one in context A and the other session in context B. A half of the rats were allowed to drink distilled water within context B, while the other half of the group spent the same amount of time in context B without access to water. In context A, half of the subjects received conditioning and extinction of flavor X, while the other half did not received extinction. Then conditioning of flavor Y was conducted for all rats in context A. Finally, testing of Y was conducted in context A for half of the rats, while the other half received the test in context B. Results shown that extinction of flavor X affected the recovery of subsequently acquired information about flavor Y regardless the treatment received in context B. This data is consistent with Attentional Theory of Context Processing.

Reconciling the influence of predictiveness and uncertainty on stimulus salience: a model of attention in associative learning

Theories of selective attention in associative learning posit that the salience of a cue will be high if the cue is the best available predictor of reinforcement (high predictiveness). In contrast, a different class of attentional theory stipulates that the salience of a cue will be high if the cue is an inaccurate predictor of reinforcement (high uncertainty). Evidence in support of these seemingly contradictory propositions has led to: (i) the development of hybrid attentional models that assume the coexistence of separate, predictiveness-driven and uncertainty-driven mechanisms of changes in cue salience; and (ii) a surge of interest in identifying the neural circuits underpinning these mechanisms. Here, we put forward a formal attentional model of learning that reconciles the roles of predictiveness and uncertainty in salience modification. The issues discussed are relevant to psychologists, behavioural neuroscientists and neuroeconomists investigating the roles of predictiveness and uncertainty in behaviour.