INFLUENCE OF CAUSAL KNOWLEDGE ON DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES

When making decisions, it is often difficult to keep track of all available cues in the environment and to compute their validity. This problem becomes even more critical if the predictive power of all plausible compound cues that could be generated from the combination of simple cues is considered. We hypothesize that knowledge about the causal structure of environment helps them focus on a manageable subset of cues, thus effectively reducing the potential computational complexity inherent in even relatively simple decision-making tasks. Experimental evidence is presented that supports this hypothesis.