Information presentation constraints and the adaptive decision maker hypothesis

Participants examined sets of apartments described along 4 dimensions. Attr ibute values were manipulated to provide a way to infer strategy from respo nse patterns. Experiment 1 established baseline behavior in unconstrained s earch, whereas Experiments 2-4 constrained participants to search either by alternative or by dimension. Dimensionwise presentation resulted in higher accuracy and reduced looking times. In 3-alternative choice, there was no evidence that strategy use depended on constraint condition. Evidence for p ossible strategy differences across constraint conditions was found when ei ther multiple judgments rather than a single choice had to be made or the n umber of alternatives was increased to 5. These results supported features of the adaptive decision maker hypothesis (J. W. Payne, J. R. Bettman, & E. J. Johnson, 1988) but suggested that strategy use is not always strongly l inked to acquisition pattern.