Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research on the effects of probability and delay ondecision-making has focused on examining each dimensionseparately, and hence little is known about when these dimen-sions are combined into a single choice option. Importantly,we know little about the psychological processes underlyingchoice behavior with rewards that are both delayed and proba-bilistic. Using a process-tracing experimental design, we mon-itored information acquisition patterns and processing strate-gies. We found that probability and delay are processed se-quentially and evaluations of risky delayed prospects are de-pendent on the sequence of information acquisition. Amongchoice strategies, directly comparing the values of each dimen-sion (i.e., dimension-wise processing) appears to be most fa-vored by participants. Our results provide insights into the psy-chological plausibility of existing computational models andmake suggestions for the development of a process model forrisky intertemporal choice.