Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Aggregate statistics, such as percentage of choices, drive manyinsights about sequential behavior in decision making re-search. However, aggregation leaves usable information andpotential insights unexamined. Here, we introduce the useof recurrence plots (RP) and recurrence quantification anal-ysis (RQA) to explore individual choice sequences and de-termine generalized patterns of decision making strategies ina dynamic decision task. We illustrate the insights that RPsand RQAs reveal in a data set collected in a past study in-volving a dynamic, binary choice task (McCormick et al., inpreparation). Patterns of recurrence reveal multiple, distin-guishable, individual choice patterns among participants whowere equally successful in adapting to the dynamic environ-ment. We discuss how RQA of choice behavior can augmentour understanding of decision strategies when paired with tra-ditional aggregate assessments.