Psychology Brown Bag: Dr. Mario Fific : A Race Model for Multiple Stopping Rules in Decision Making.

Friday, February 2, 2018, 12:15 pm to 1:15 pm
Campus: 
Dayton
Fawcett 339A
Audience: 
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A Race Model for Multiple Stopping Rules in Decision Making

 

Mario Fific, Grand Valley State University

A parallel race model is proposed for human stopping behavior in decision making. The model is called the Cast-Net as it selects a stopping rule by randomly drawing from a parameter space spanned by a range of possible stopping rule values. It is hypothesized that a decision maker controls the span of the parameter space. The model synthesizes the three major stopping rules (critical difference, runs, fixed-sample size), the sequential sampling, the variable threshold approach, and the parallel processing structure. The model was tested using a deferred decision task in the context of a shopping situation. Subjects are asked to open an optional number of either positive or negative recommendations about the quality of products, and to make the best buying decision. The results indicated that the Cast-Net model provides reasonable theoretical grounds of how different simple stopping rules can be combined within one decision making model.


 

Dr. Fific is an associate professor at Grand Valley State University, Michigan. He has formal doctoral and postdoctoral training in quantitative methods, with an emphasis on mental process tracing and mental system analysis. His areas of expertise are in the fields of memory, visual search, classification, face recognition, attention, and judgment and decision making. He uses evidence accumulation models and joint analysis of reaction time (RT) distributions and choice preferences. His achievements so far include the development of the original cognitive decision-making model that synthesizes mental-architecture, random-walk, and decision-bound approaches for predicting perceptual classification RTs and choice probabilities (Fific et al., 2010). He spent three years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition in Berlin, Germany, collaborating with Gerd Gigerenzer. His work at the Max Planck focused on creating and developing computational models of boundedly rational approaches to decision making, promoting fast and frugal decision making. Dr. Fific was awarded with the research grant in the domain of decision making ("Stopping Rule Selection Theory, 2012-2016). Dr. Fific is still actively running the granted project.

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