Decision Time as a Function of Task Complexity

Abstract

When a choice is to be made among a given number of alternatives, task complexity as well as cognitive strain are defined to be increasing functions of both the number of aspects per alternative and difficulty of choice between alternatives. The decision maker is considered to minimize the cost of (1) time of the decision procedure and (2) errors made. Due to limits of information processing capacity, optimal decision time is proposed to be a concave function of task complexity: for both simple and too complex tasks decision time relatively small.