The Role of Visual and Auditory Attention in Decision Making

Abstract

We make countless decisions throughout the day from what to wear to which song to listen to. We know the role of preferences in these decisions and that attention is also important for preference based decisions. The role of both individual preferences and attention in choice have been extensively studied in the visual domain. However, no studies have addressed the role of attention in auditory choices, which is problematic because we don’t live in a purely visual world. In the current study, we extended the scope of the attention in choice literature into the auditory domain. We based our hypotheses on findings from the visual, preference-based choice literature and expected to see a similar pattern. We replicated a common experimental structure from the visual choice domain. Subjects first completed a rating task to indicate their preferences. Next, they made 200 binary choices where they chose which of two songs they preferred on each trial. For each choice, two choruses were played, one in each ear, via over-ear headphones. White noise was played binaurally to prevent easy listening to both songs. Participants could remove the white noise in the left or right ear by pressing the left or right arrow keys, respectively. To select their preferred song, they used the mouse to click on the corresponding side of the screen (i.e. click to the left to choose the left song, and vice versa on the right). We found that subjects were able to choose in line with their ratings, they took longer to make more difficult decisions, they chose songs they listened to longer, and were more likely to choose the last song they listened to. These results demonstrate a clear relationship between attention in choice across sensory domains.