Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Ambiguity aversion, or the preference for options with known rather than unknown probabilities, is a robust findingwithin the decision making literature (see Camerer & Weber, 1992, for a review). There are some suggestions this aversenessis due differences in the inferred prior distribution (G ̈uney & Newell, 2015). In this study we investigated the relationshipbetween prior distributions and information cues on decision making and participants’ judgments of underlying distribution.We used three different prior cues; a positive underlying distributional cue, a negative underlying distributional cue, and aneutral cue. We also used five different information cues which varied both the bias of the information and the degree ofambiguity. Whilst we found that both prior and information manipulations had the expected impact for participants’ judgmentsof underlying distributions, they only impacted the decisions participants made in some cases. There were also interestinginteractions between the prior and information manipulations.