The Impact of accuracy and effort feedback and goals on adaptive decision behavior

TLDR

Complex interactive relationships between feedback types and goal structures highlight the need for further study of feedback and goals on adaptive decision behavior. The study examines how accuracy feedback, effort feedback, and goal emphasis on accuracy versus effort affect decision processes. The authors investigated these effects by manipulating accuracy feedback, effort feedback, and goal emphasis in decision‑making tasks. Accuracy feedback improved normative processing and performance only on difficult problems, effort feedback had little effect, and goal emphasis shifted strategies as predicted, with accuracy goals yielding more normative processing and better performance, while effort goals led to selective processing and poorer performance, providing strong evidence of goal effects on processing.

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines the impact of accuracy feedback, effort feedback, and emphasis on either a goal of maximizing accuracy relative to effort or minimizing effort relative to accuracy on decision processes. Feedback on the accuracy of decisions leads to more normative‐like processing of information and improved performance only in the most difficult problems, i.e., decisions with low dispersion in attribute weights. Explicit effort feedback has almost no impact on processing or performance. The impact of the goal manipulation on decision processes was found to be consistent with the shift in strategies predicted by an effort/accuracy model of strategy selection. In particular, a goal of emphasizing accuracy led to more normative‐like processing, while emphasis on effort led to less extensive, more selective, and more attribute‐based processing and poorer performance. These results provide perhaps the clearest evidence to date of the effect of goals on processing differences. Complex interactive relationships between types of feedback and goal structures suggest the need for additional study of feedback and goals on adaptive decision behavior.