Basic mechanisms underlying reasoning and decision making

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The ability to think and reason is one of the most remarkable feats of the human mind, and is arguably one of the key cognitive faculties that separates the human mind from that of other animals. However, the human mind is not perfect, and does not always make optimal decisions. Decades of research has documented a multitude of ways in which human thinking and reasoning is fallible, resulting in biased performance in a number of domains. For example, people often let their personal beliefs guide their thinking when it would be more optimal to use logic. Furthermore, people are often overconfident in their judgments and decisions, even when their reasoning performance is error prone. Perhaps surprisingly, we still know little about the cognitive mechanisms that promote effective thinking. The research proposed in my current grant application will make important headway towards understanding this by systematically examining the basic cognitive mechanisms supporting effective reasoning, particularly focusing on how metacognitive processes (e.g., subjective confidence) affect how we allocate our attention in reasoning and decision-making tasks. In addition, by including individual differences measures indexing cognitive ability and thinking styles, my lab will determine the extent to which the coupling of metacognition and attention varies as a function of key individual differences known to significantly affect reasoning performance. These are important research questions, as understanding the role of metacognition in guiding people's attention to relevant information in a reasoning task will help not only inform our understanding of the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying successful reasoning performance, but it will also ultimately help shape manipulations designed to reduce bias and promote effective reasoning, which is a secondary objective of the proposed research. Specifically, once the metacognitive and attentional mechanisms underlying reasoning performance are better understood, my lab will then empirically examine experimental manipulations that target those mechanisms to examine the degree to which attention to relevant dimensions of reasoning tasks, and overall reasoning performance, can be facilitated. At an academic level, the findings from the proposed studies will enable my lab to develop a more comprehensive model of how higher-level cognitive processes (e.g., metacognition) interact with lower-level cognitive processes (e.g., attention) when reasoning and decision-making. At a practical level, by gaining new insights into the basic cognitive mechanisms that promote effective reasoning and decision making, and determining how such mechanisms can be facilitated, my lab will be able to take important steps towards developing strategies that can be used to reduce bias and facilitate reasoning and decision making in domains that have real-world consequences (e.g., personal health, finance).