What is it about?
When people face decisions with many options and attributes, they cannot look at everything. This study presents a new theory that explains how people distribute their attention in an efficient and goal‑driven, but not perfect, way. The model suggests that people search for information that helps them quickly find the option that best fits their goals. It also explains why we look longer at things we later choose and why we check promising options more often. A new and preregistered eye‑tracking experiment supports the model’s predictions better than other existing theories, offering a clearer picture of how attention and decision‑making interact.
Featured Image
Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our theory offers a psychologically plausible account of many patterns of attention-choice interactions that have been reported in previous research and replicated in our own preregistered experiment. This includes the positive link between attention and choice probability, the positive link between subjective value and attention, and the tendency to attend to more important attribute first. At the same time, the model is applicable to simple decisions between just two options (e.g. two food snacks) as well as complex decisions with many options and many attributes.
Perspectives
This work can be considered as the culmination of my research on the interaction of attention and choice (see also Gluth et al., 2018, eLife; Gluth et al., 2020, Nature Human Behaviour), and it is now setting the stage for further investigation of the underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms.
Sebastian Gluth
University of Hamburg
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A theory of multiattribute search and choice., Psychological Review, March 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/rev0000614.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
