Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is generally difficult for people to make rational and accurate judgments under their limited cognitive resources. In this study, we propose an intervention to easily improve people’s judgmental accuracy with less workload by waiting for a short time at the beginning of a task. By using a simple binary choice task, we found that when a short (1s) waiting time was inserted, participants showed higher accuracy than when no waiting time was inserted, and they felt less mental workload than when a longer (2.5s) waiting time was inserted. To examine the underlying implicit cognitive processes, we applied mouse tracking approaches during choice behaviors. We found that the inserted time enhanced participants’ change of mind (i.e., they amended their initial wrong judgments). These results suggest that making people wait for only 1s will serve as a simple, effective, and resource-rational intervention to boost people’s accuracy of judgments. Because of its simplicity, we believe that this intervention has potential to be applied in various fields.