Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

From an evolutionary perspective, it has been proposed that decision making should be sensitive to the overallmagnitude of the alternatives under consideration in order to resolve costly deadlocks and thus improve long-term rewardintake. We provide initial evidence that the overall magnitude of the alternatives affects decision making, by speeding updecision time in order to maximise a speed-value trade off. Implications for current computational models of decision making,in particular for the Drift Diffusion Model, are discussed.