Choosing Among Causal Agents in a Dynamic Environment

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People face numerous decisions throughout the day, but nowhere are these decisions as critical as when they occur under conditions of stress, complexity, and time pressure. Choosing among a range of possible causes of explosions, weird noises, malfunctioning machinery, or unusual readings on instruments is difficult, especially when there are multiple competing candidates with varying time signatures, likelihoods, and intensities. Previous research on causal judgment has focused on controlled experiments, but everyday decision making occurs under less pristine conditions. To examine the extent to which prior approaches apply in complex dynamic situations, the proposed studies examine behavior within the context of a video game that involves multiple causal candidates, many visual perspectives, and varying degrees of complexity. Participants in the study will be faced with battlefield decisions regarding the source of enemy fire or other threats.The theoretical basis for these studies is that causal judgments rely on the subjective certainty regarding whether an effect will occur and when it will occur. The experiments are designed to (a) evaluate the relative effectiveness of various methods of bridging delays between causes and their effects (given that delays are known to be detrimental to effective source identification), (b) assess theoretical predictions relating to the integration of information about contingency, endogenous temporal variability, and exogenous temporal variability, and (c) determine whether a proposed theoretical model extends to situations in which a cause and its effect are continuously related (e.g., the proximity of a cause determines the magnitude of its effect). A critical contribution of this project is the creation of a video game environment for studying decision making. This platform will be shared with other scientists to encourage the development of theories of dynamic decision making.