Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The attraction effect in decision-making is a famous exampleof how preferences are influenced by the availability of otheroptions. One emerging hypothesis for the effect is that biasesin attention influence preferences. In the past, these ideashave been explored indirectly through computationalmodeling and eye tracking. In the present paper, we directlymanipulate attention through presentation order, presentingchoice options sequentially. Our results show thatpresentation order has a large impact on the effect – somepresentation orders enhance the effect and other ordersreverse the effect. To understand these results, we fit adynamic model, called the Multiattribute Linear BallisticAccumulator model, to the choice and response time data.Modeling results reveal that presentation order influences theallocation of attention on the positive and negative differencesbetween options. In sum, our results show that attention has adirect impact on the attraction effect.