Collaborative Research: Attention in Games and Decisions

注意力是一种有限的资源，缺乏注意力可能会增加认知负荷，从而对决策产生不利影响。甚至有人提出，陷入贫困的人可能会因这一问题而遭受不成比例的痛苦。 在这个建议中，主要研究者进行研究，以增加我们对注意力限制下的战略情境中的决策过程的理解，方法是直接量化人们在做出注意力分配决策时所关注的内容。这些问题不仅影响到个人，而且影响到由首席执行官和民选官员管理的复杂组织，如果他们不能有效地分配自己或员工的时间来解决他们面临的问题。因此，详细了解是什么吸引了决策者的注意力，一个问题是显着的潜在重要性。 如果成功的话，这里进行的工作可能会使我们更好地理解那些必须在自我强加的注意力限制下做出选择的人的行为。 在技术层面上，这项工作将实验室实验与眼动跟踪技术相结合。在实验中，受试者不参与战略互动或直接做出决定，而是预测他们希望在未来分配多少时间来解决一系列问题。 将使用眼动追踪和注意力时间测量来识别这些问题的吸引受试者注意力的特征。该项目的第二个目标是将注意力分配过程与决策过程联系起来，方法是将受试者打算分配给思考未来问题的时间与受试者在面对同一问题时实际采取的决策时间相关联。最后，眼动追踪将用于发现受试者在分配注意力时是否注意到他们所面临的决策问题的不同方面，而不是实际做出决策。

Attention is a limited resource whose absence may adversely affect decision-making by increasing cognitive load. It has even been suggested that people trapped in poverty may suffer disproportionately from this problem. In this proposal the Principal Investigators undertake research to increase our understanding of the process of decision making in strategic situations under attentional constraints by directly quantifying what people focus on when they make their attention-allocation decisions. Such issues not only affect individuals, but also complex organizations run by CEO's and elected officials if they do not allocate their own or their employee's time efficiently across the problems they face. Thus, a detailed understanding of what attracts a decision maker's attention to a problem is of significant potential importance. If successful, the work conducted here may move us in the direction of a better understanding of the behavior of people who must make choices under self-imposed attentional constraints. On a technical level, the work proposed combines laboratory experiments with eye tracking techniques. In the experiments, subjects do not engage in strategic interactions or make decisions directly, but rather project how much time they want to allocate in the future across a set of problems presented to them. Features of these problems that attract subjects' attention will be identified using eye tracking and measures of attention time. A second goal of the project is to relate the process of attention allocation to decision making by correlating the amount of time a subject intends to allocate to contemplating a problem in the future to the decision time that subjects actually take when facing this same problem. Finally, eye tracking will be used to discover whether subjects attend to different aspects of the decision problems they face when allocating their attention as opposed to actually making a decision.