Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent evidence shows that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, people who are pressured to think fast are also less likely to provide a heuristic judgment when heuristic and logical considerations point to conflicting answers in a conjunction fallacy task (Vallée-Tourangeau & Faure- Bloom, under review). The present study explores this finding using an eye-tracking methodology. Eye movements from 41 participants were recorded while they read a thumbnail description and made a judgment on a statement comparing the probability of a single-event and that of a conjunctive event. Results showed participants focused more on the comparative probability statement under logicoheuristic conflict while they focused more the task description in the absence of conflict. Additionally, longer judgment latencies predicted higher rates of heuristic responding, which contradicts the original dual-process assumption that heuristic thinking in conjunction fallacy tasks is fast.