Modeling the Underlying Dynamic Processes in Motivation and Decision Making: A Parsimonious Self-Regulatory Approach

“该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。“大多数正式的决策模型将其视为一个静态过程（即，某些变量集合的当前状态如何影响特定选择的概率）。 这种方法忽略了这样一个事实，即每个人每天都面临着许多关于资源分配的决定（例如，时间、注意力和努力），以满足或维持多个目标。它也忽略了一个事实，即随着时间的推移，环境（包括内部和外部）的变化和学习的发生，这两者都可能导致一个人为达到或保持一个目标而做出的选择的变化。的目标。最后，当代的决策模型在很大程度上是沉默的关于潜在的心理和信息过程，负责观察到的决策模式随着时间的推移。在这项资助下，一组由一名工程师和三名心理学家组成的研究人员使用一种简单的信息处理结构？工程控制理论中常见的加权差分模型？来解释众多的决策、动机和经济现象。例如，这种结构被用来构建模型，解释为什么1）个人在工资相对较低的日子里工作更长时间; 2）对一个人的信念？的执行能力有时负相关，有时正相关的资源分配给任务; 3）个人倾向于在两个任务之间来回切换具有相同的最后期限，但然后只关注一个作为最后期限的临近; 4）个人改变他们的风险态度时，他们的选择，因为他们接近他们的目标，和5）个人？随着时间的推移改变他们的选择，尽管选项或其属性没有改变。几个实证研究的目的是测试所提出的模型。如果发现有效，研究将证明基于这种结构的模型不仅允许随着时间的推移进行预测（即，是动态的），但也是一致的经验证实的要素，广为接受的静态模型的决策和动机。此外，它们整合了经济，心理学和学习模型的各个方面，提供了一种普遍，全面，但简约的方法来理解自然主义背景下的人类行为。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009(Public Law 111-5)."Most formal models of decision-making treat it as a static process (i.e., how the current state of some set of variables affects the probability of a particular choice). This approach ignored the fact that each day individuals are faced with numerous decisions regarding the allocation of resources (e.g., time, attention, and effort) across competing tasks in order to meet or maintain many goals. It also ignores that fact that, over time, circumstances (both internal and external) change and learning occurs both of which may result in changes in the choices one makes to attain or maintain one?s goals. Finally, contemporary models of decision making are largely silent with regards to the underlying psychological and information processes that are responsible for observed decision patterns over time. Under this grant, a group of researchers composed of an engineer and three psychologists use a simple information processing structure ? the weighted difference model common in engineering control theories ? to explain numerous decision-making, motivational, and economic phenomena. For example, this structure is used to construct models that explain why 1) individuals work longer on days when they are paid a relatively lower wage; 2) beliefs in one?s capacities to perform are sometimes negatively and sometimes positively related to the resources one allocates to the task; 3) individuals tend to switch back and forth between two tasks with the same deadline, but then focus on only one as the deadline draws near; 4) individuals change their risk attitudes when making choices as they approach their goal, and 5) individuals? change their choices over time despite no change in the options or their attributes. Several empirical studies are designed to test the proposed models. If found valid, the research will demonstrate that models based on this structure not only allow predictions over time (i.e., are dynamic), but also are consistent with empirically confirmed elements of well-accepted static models of decision making and motivation. Moreover, they integrate aspects of economic, psychomotor, and learning models, providing a general, comprehensive, yet parsimonious approach to understanding human behavior in naturalistic contexts.