No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Our memory of past choices influences our future choices, yet is subject to error and manipulation. Choice blindness studies have shown that people often fail to notice when an option they did not choose is presented in place of one they chose. This raises the question of just how we remember the choices we make. Do we remember all options similarly, or does the process of choosing bias our memory in ways that make us susceptible to the deception in choice blindness tasks? I begin by contrasting choice blindness with change blindness to develop an account of cognitive processes in choice blindness, followed by an overview of contemporary research on choice and memory. Experiment 1 then tests the effect choosing a face has on our memory of that face, compared with our memory of the alternative, unchosen face. Results show that chosen faces are better recognised than unchosen, regardless of whether the chosen faces are actually preferred. Experiment 2 tests our memory for decisions made, and shows participants remember that they chose a face better than they remember that they did not choose a face. A third experiment tests these effects in a replication and variation of the original choice blindness task. In the variant, after deception participants are deceptively asked to justify why they did not choose a face which they actually just chose. Results suggest that the counter-intuitive choice blindness phenomenon is not being driven by a failure of the deceptively presented face to cue sufficient memories to detect the deception. Qualitative findings suggest that increasing the importance of the choice may facilitate experimental research with choice blindness tasks. An integration across my studies highlights some problems for contemporary self-reference and self-choice based theories of choice and memory.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.