Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When making decisions humans often violate the principlesof rational choice theory. Recent experiments, involving rapidexperiential decisions, uncovered a mechanism that is respon-sible for various rationality violations. According to this se-lective gating mechanism, incoming value samples are accu-mulated across time, but prior to their accumulation they areweighted in proportion to their momentary rank-order. Here,using a data-driven approach, I present a dynamic extensionof this mechanism, which involves potentially asymmetric in-hibition between the inputs. As a result, and contrary to theprevious selective gating implementation, the vigour of gatingis modulated by the difference between two value samples (adistance effect) as well as by the absolute magnitude of thesamples (a magnitude effect). This extension offers a supe-rior explanation to existing and new data; and links high-leveldecision phenomena with computational principles previouslydescribed in theories of selective attention and visual search.