Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is currently difficult to test the validity of existing explana-tions for the emergence of context-dependent preference rever-sals. This is because these explanations are generally placed atthe level of the process of evidence accumulation, and acrossexperimental paradigms, this process is unobservable. In thispaper, we propose a new experimental paradigm for elicitingpreference reversals, wherein the process of evidence accumu-lation is significantly observable. Over a series of experiments,we successfully induce preference reversals for arbitrary stim-uli by showing participants sequences of stimuli comparisonswith pre-determined outcomes. Our findings partially supportthe view that context-sensitive assimilation of a history of ordi-nal comparisons is sufficient to explain classic context effects.