Interrupting the cascade: orienting contributes to decision making even in the absence of visual stimulation.

Most systematic studies of human decision making approach the subject from a cost analysis point of view and assume that people make the highest utility choice. Very few articles investigate subjective decision making, such as that involving preference, although such decisions are very important for our daily functioning. We have argued (Shimojo, Simion, Shimojo, & Scheier, 2003) that an orienting bias effectively leads to the preference decision by means of a positive feedback loop involving mere exposure and preferential looking.

Early interactions between orienting, visual sampling and decision making in facial preference.

Decision making has been regarded as the last stage before action in the human information processing, certainly subsequent to sensory sampling and perceptual integration. Our latest study showed that orienting contributes to preference decision making, by integrating preferential looking and mere exposure in a positive feedback loop leading to the conscious choice. Here, we introduce a gaze-contingent window method of stimulus presentation into our experimental paradigm, to completely block holistic stimulus processing while preserving piecemeal sampling through the gaze-contingent "peephole".

Gaze bias both reflects and influences preference.

Emotions operate along the dimension of approach and aversion, and it is reasonable to assume that orienting behavior is intrinsically linked to emotionally involved processes such as preference decisions. Here we describe a gaze 'cascade effect' that was present when human observers were shown pairs of human faces and instructed to decide which face was more attractive. Their gaze was initially distributed evenly between the two stimuli, but then gradually shifted toward the face that they eventually chose.