Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans primarily seek to maximize accuracy during task-based decision-making, but prefer to minimize time and effort as well. As time and effort demands are often coupled, the current work examines the relative influences of these secondary minimization goals on decision strategy selection. University students (N=144; ages 18-37) learned two strategies for completing a classification task involving fictional microorganisms: one that demanded moderately effortful integration over learned feature associations, and a minimal-effort alternative that required participants to wait for an answer to be provided. An adaptive experimental design ensured that both strategies yielded equivalent long-run accuracy within-subject, and wait times for the latter were manipulated to be longer or equal to deliberation times in the former. Participants overwhelmingly preferred the more effortful, time-saving strategy. Surprisingly, this preference persisted even when the strategies were matched for both accuracy and time, suggesting the perceived benefit of engagement outweighed the costs of effort.