Learning from failure: Understanding inefficiency in attention and decisions - ELPHINSTONE

We face many competing demands on our attention in our daily lives, and regularly have to divide our time and attention between different tasks. When resolving this competition between multiple tasks and goals, one would hope that we would allocate our cognitive resources in the best possible way given the time we have, our abilities and strengths, and the difficulty of the tasks involved. However, our recent findings suggest most people fail to make rational decisions about how to allocate cognitive resources under even quite simple task constraints (Clarke and Hunt, Psychological Science, 2016). We replicated this failure using a range of different task contexts (e.g. eye movements, memorizing information, and deciding where to stand to throw a beanbag at one of two possible targets). In visual search, we observed an analogous failure to use readily-available information about the likely location of a target when deciding where to look (Nowakowska, Clarke and Hunt, 2017).
Studying these failures provides a unique opportunity to gain a better understanding of attention and decisions. A wide range of questions need to be addressed: why this breakdown occurs, how much these failures affect daily life, and whether we can improve the efficiency of human decisions in these contexts by examining various potential mediating factors and explanations such as strategy, expertise, insight and reward. One especially intriguing aspect of our recent results from experiments assessing the efficiency of decisions is the wide range of individual differences we observe in these tasks. The majority of participants either do not adjust behavior when task difficulty changes, or do adjust but in a way that fails to optimize their performance. Therefore, on average, human behavior is far from optimal. However, we consistently observe a few participants (~10%) who can adjust their behaviour appropriately to account for changes in the difficulty of tasks. Gaining a better understanding of these individual differences in strategy will allow us to build a more complete model of how we sample information and use it to guide our behavior.

To be considered for funding you will need to be UK or EU students, with the equivalent to a 1st class Honours undergraduate degree or a 2.1 Honours undergraduate degree alongside a Masters with Merit or Distinction in Psychology or cognate discipline. International applicants who meet this condition and can pay the difference between the Home and International Fees would also be considered.

Applications must include: 1) An on-line form completed through the applicant portal. 2) a letter of support from the project supervisor. 3) Two academic references – please attach the references to the application or include full referee contact details. 4) A CV outlining your academic qualifications and research experience to date. 5) academic transcripts from previous degree(s).