The Relationship between Adaptive Strategy Selection and Cognitive Effort: An Eye-tracking Study

Abstract

We investigated whether people make choices and regulate cognitive effort adaptively depending on the task structure. We employed an eye-tracking methodology to examine whether measures of cog- nitive effort (i.e., reaction times and pupil size) predict choices in high and low expected values ratio choice problems. We measured how frequently participants made choices consistent with predictions of cumulative prospect theory vs. priority heuristic models. Partici- pants were more likely to make choices predicted by cu- mulative prospect theory in choice problems with high expected value ratio, while in choices of low expected value ratio problems, they tended to select an alter- native predicted by priority heuristic. Choice latency but not pupil size was directly related to choices con- tingent upon cumulative prospect theory. Notably, we observed that the likelihood of choices priority heuristic decreased with pupil size, but only in case consistent with low expected value ratio.