A Dual-Process Memory Account of How to Make an Evaluation from Complex and Complete Information

Individuals are required to cope with uncertain, dispersed, incomplete, and incompatible sources of information in real life. We devised an experiment to reveal empirical "anomalies" in the process of acquisition, elaboration and retrieval of economic related information. Our results support the existence of a dual process in memory that is posited by the fuzzy-trace theory: acquisition of information leads to the formation of a gist representation which may be incompatible with the exact verbatim information stored in memory. We gave participants complex and complete information and then measured their cognitive ability. We conclude that individuals used their gist representation rather than processing verbatim information appropriately to make an evaluation. Finally, we provide evidence that subjects with low cognitive abilities tend to demonstrate more often this specific behavior.