Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When it comes to decision making, the dominant viewsuggests that engaging in a detailed analytical thought processis more beneficial than deciding based on one’s feelings.However, there seems to be a tradeoff, as the complexity andamount of elements on which to base the decision increases,decisions based on affect seem to be more accurate thandecisions based on a thorough analytical process in specificcontexts. In those last cases, an affective modulation ofmemory may help to make better decisions in complex tasksthat exceed human’s limited cognitive capacities. Some dualprocess accounts, ‘‘deliberation-without-attention’’hypothesis (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006), oppose a cognitive (i.e.,conscious) route to an affective (i.e., unconscious) route.Since most dual process accounts suggest one type of processis better than the other, the interaction and integration ofaffective and more conscious analytical processes in decisionmaking have been understudied. To address this issue, wepropose an explanation of the dynamics and interaction ofcognitive (i.e., explicit) and affective (i.e., implicit) encodingand retrieval of elements in memory, using a unified theorybased on core affect (Russell, 2003), in the shape of acognitive model in the ACT-R cognitive architecture.