Behavioral Signatures of Post-Decisional Attention in Preferential Choice

Attention plays a key role in decision-making by directing limited cognitive resources to relevant information. It has been proposed that attention also biases the decision process, due to a multiplicative interaction between attention and subjective value (e.g., Krajbich et al., 2010). We tested two predictions of models that posit a causal multiplicative effect of attention on decision formation: (i) the last fixation should be more informative about the choice when the overall value of the alternatives is high, and (ii) more attention should be directed to the chosen option when choices conflict with stated preferences than when they do not. Reanalyzing data from a food-choice task (Krajbich et al., 2010), we found no evidence supporting these predictions. A similar discrepancy with the data is observed in recent normative models, which propose that gaze allocation arises from a process of Bayesian inference about the latent values of the alternatives (Callaway et al., 2021; Jang et al., 2021). An alternative model where attention reflects choices after the decision has completed, explains key observations, including the last-fixation bias, the gaze-cascade effect and the effect of the overall value of the alternatives on response times. However, this model does not fully account for the association between dwell time and choice. We conclude that gaze behavior prior to the choice report likely reflects both decisional and post-decisional processes.