Can longer gaze duration determine risky investment decisions? An interactive perspective

Abstract

Can longer gaze duration determine risky investment decisions? Recent studies have tested how gaze influences people’s decisions and the boundary of the gaze effect. The current experiment used adaptive gaze-contingent manipulation by adding a self-determined option to test whether longer gaze duration can determine risky investment decisions. The results showed that both the expected value of each option and the gaze duration influenced people’s decisions. This result was consistent with the attentional diffusion model (aDDM) proposed by Krajbich et al. (2010), which suggests that gaze can influence the choice process by amplify the value of the choice. Therefore, the gaze duration would influence the decision when people do not have clear preference.The result also showed that the similarity between options and the computational difficulty would also influence the gaze effect. This result was inconsistent with prior research that used option similarities to represent difficulty, suggesting that both similarity between options and computational difficulty induce different underlying mechanisms of decision difficulty.