Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The study of multi-cue judgment investigates how decisionmakers integrate cues to predict the value of a criterionvariable. We consider a multi-cue judgment task in whichdecision makers have prior knowledge of inter-cuerelationships but are ignorant of how the cues correlate withthe criterion. In this setting, a naive judgment strategyprescribes an equal weight for each cue. However, we findthat many participants appear to use a weighting schemebased on a low-dimensional representation of the cue space.The use of such a representation is consistent with coreinsights in semantic memory research and has importantoptimality properties concerning judgment accuracy.