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How do people decide which risks they want to get informed about? The present study examines the role of the availability and affect heuristics on these decisions. Participants (N= 100, aged 19-72 years) selected for which of 23 cancers they would like to receive an information brochure, reported the number of occurrences of each type of cancer in their social circle (availability), and rated their dread reaction to each type of cancer (affect); they also made relative judgments about which of 2 cancers was more common in Germany (judged risk). Participants tended to choose information brochures for those cancers for which they indicated a higher availability within their social networks as well as for cancers they dreaded. Mediation analyses suggested that the influence of availability and affect on information choice was only partly mediated by judged risk. The results demonstrate the operation of 2 key judgment heuristics (availability and affect), previously studied in risk perception, also in decisions about information choice. We discuss how our findings can be used to identify which risks are likely to fall from people's radar.
Many of our daily decisions are memory based, that is, the attribute information about the decision alternatives has to be recalled. Behavioral studies suggest that for such decisions we often use simple strategies (heuristics) that rely on controlled and limited information search. It is assumed that these heuristics simplify decision-making by activating long-term memory representations of only those attributes that are necessary for the decision. However, from behavioral studies alone, it is unclear whether using heuristics is indeed associated with limited memory search. The present study tested this assumption by monitoring the activation of specific long-term-memory representations with fMRI while participants made memory-based decisions using the "take-the-best" heuristic. For different decision trials, different numbers and types of information had to be retrieved and processed. The attributes consisted of visual information known to be represented in different parts of the posterior cortex. We found that the amount of information required for a decision was mirrored by a parametric activation of the dorsolateral PFC. Such a parametric pattern was also observed in all posterior areas, suggesting that activation was not limited to those attributes required for a decision. However, the posterior increases were systematically modulated by the relative importance of the information for making a decision. These findings suggest that memory-based decision-making is mediated by the dorsolateral PFC, which selectively controls posterior storage areas. In addition, the systematic modulations of the posterior activations indicate a selective boosting of activation of decision-relevant attributes.