Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While previous models of economic decision-making offer de-scriptive accounts of behavior, they often overlook the com-putational complexity of estimating expected utility. Here,we seek to understand how both environmental and individualconstraints on cognition shape our daily decision. Informedby the predictions of a recently-proposed resource-rationalprocess model of risky choice, sample-based expected utility(SbEU; Nobandegani, da Silva Castanheira, Otto, & Shultz,2018), we reveal that both time pressure and individual dif-ferences in processing speed have a convergent effect on riskpreferences during a risky decision-making task. Under severetime constraints, participants’ risk preferences manifested astrong framing effect compared to little time pressure in whichchoice adhered to the classic fourfold pattern of risk prefer-ences. Similarly, individual differences in processing speed,measured using an established task, predicted similar effectsupon risk attitudes as extrinsic time pressure. These findingsreveal a converging contribution of environmental and individ-ual limitations on risky choice, and provide empirical supportfor SbEU as a resource-rational process model of risky deci-sion making. Notably, SbEU serves as a single-process modelof two well-established biases, and the transition between thetwo, in risky choice.