Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In many natural domains, risks and rewards are inversely re-lated (Pleskac & Hertwig, 2014). We sought to understandhow people might use this relationship in choosing amongrisky gambles. To do so we, manipulated risk-reward struc-tures of monetary gambles to be either negatively or positivelycorrelated, or uncorrelated. After substantial exposure to theseenvironments, participants completed a speeded choice taskamong non-dominated gambles. Eye-tracking data from thistask suggests that participants often shifted their attention tomainly one attribute in the correlated conditions, in which therisk-reward relationship was present. This was an adaptivestrategy that resulted in a similar proportion of expected-valuemaximizing choices, compared to a more compensatory pro-cessing strategy.