Running Head: ORDER EFFECTS ON NON-FOCAL EVALUATIONS 1 Stopping Decisions: Information Order Effects on Non-Focal Evaluations

Objective: Understand how the order in which information is presented affects when a person decides to stop performing a task. Background: Stopping decisions describe a decision to stop performing a task based on a sequence of cues. Previous order effects models do not consider how these contexts limit available working memory to make such decisions. Method: Participants choose for how long to perform a task, known as the “Work Hazard Game,” that began by rewarding points but later cost points if work continued after an unannounced “emergency. ” An additive sequence of cues indicated the probability of an emergency. Study 1 used a 3-group design with cue sequences that indicated the same risk at each decision point, but whose final cue presented a high, medium, or low probability. Study 2 used a 2x2 design with high or low final cues and an easy or a challenging task. Results: In Study 1, participants stopped sooner when the most recent cue presented a high rather than low probability (p = 0.09), despite the same emergency risk. In Study 2, participants stopped sooner when the most recent cue presented a high rather than low probability for the challenging, but not easy task (p = 0.08). ORDER EFFECTS ON NON-FOCAL EVALUATIONS 3 Conclusion: Stopping decisions appear sensitive to the most recent cue observed when under task load. Participants responded to the same risks differently, based only on a change in presentation. Application: Findings may be relevant for research and training for hazardous jobs, such as subsurface coal mining, fishing, and trucking. ORDER EFFECTS ON NON-FOCAL EVALUATIONS 4 In many real-world tasks decision makers must focus on performing their job while at the same time evaluating safety job conditions. For example, in subsurface coal mining, while a miner may be engaged in operating or maintaining heavy machinery (e.g., a continuous miner, shearer, or conveyor), he must also keep track of and evaluate cues of a potential mine emergency (e.g., shifts in air flow, increases in temperature, visual signs of smoke or the weakening of supports). Existing research has studied how people evaluate a series of cues (e.g., Hogarth & Einhorn, 1992). However, its focus has been on cases where the evaluation is the person’s primary task. In subsurface coal mining, we would expect the miners’ primary task to be performing their job, while evaluating safety conditions is an important but peripheral concern. In this paper, we investigate how people evaluate a series of cues when this evaluation is not their primary task. We refer to this scenario as a stopping decision, because the result of this evaluation is often a decision to either continue or stop performing the primary task. The primary task is called the focal task, and the evaluation of whether to stop is called the non-focal evaluation. For subsurface coal miners, the focal task includes normal mining operations and the non-focal evaluation is the evaluation of safety conditions. We suspect that the non-focal nature of the evaluation can lead to inconsistent decisions. To evaluate this, we ran two studies where participants perform non-focal evaluations and tested for information order effects. Specifically, we test if people would respond to the same information differently, depending upon the order in which it was presented to them. This potential for inconsistent decisions can be problematic in subsurface coal mining. First, it presents a challenge for safety trainers to communicate the appropriate safety environments under which specific actions can be taken. Second, as subsurface coal miners work ORDER EFFECTS ON NON-FOCAL EVALUATIONS 5 in crews, differing evaluations between individual crew members can result in delayed reactions to dangerous conditions or lost productivity under safe conditions. That noted, stopping decisions are not unique to subsurface coal mining. Truckers and fishermen, for example, need to evaluate weather cues to determine how long to continue driving or fishing. Athletes may need to evaluate physical injury cues to determine whether to stay in the game. Stopping decisions are also prevalent in non-hazardous professions. A factory supervisor may need to determine when production needs to be stopped for machine maintenance. Office workers often need to determine when to interrupt their work, given signs of a potential computer or software failure. For our purposes, we used a computer-based task called the “Work Hazard Game,” which includes the essential characteristics of stopping decisions in coal mining and other contexts (an important factor for making connections to real world tasks, see: Gonzalez, Vanyukov & Martin, 2005). In this game, participants (who belong to a general population), evaluated a series of cues to determine when to stop performing a money-making task. As with the subsurface coal mining, continuing the focal task provided rewards and required ongoing use of working memory; continuing the task past a certain point, indicated by the cues, would result in a loss though. A potential critique of this method would be that subsurface coal miners have an expertise in evaluating the risk of a mine emergency which our participants, facing a novel task, do not. However, prior research has shown that experts who are faced with rare events, changing cues, and limited decision aids can also make poor decisions (Shanteau, 1992). Another critique is that subsurface coal miners would be better motivated to pay attention to cues of mine emergency risk, given more severe consequences from a mistake. However, miners who fail to perform their ORDER EFFECTS ON NON-FOCAL EVALUATIONS 6 jobs effectively also face more severe consequences, suggesting that there is also a stronger motivation to focus on continuing work. In our experiments, we find that non-focal evaluations are characterized by recency: people are more sensitive to later cues than earlier cues, although our findings are tempered by low significance levels. Our second study reproduces the recency effect with a modified version of the “Work Hazard Game,” strengthening our confidence in our initial finding. Additionally, we find evidence that low working memory availability can increase the recency effect. This supports the argument that the non-focal nature of the evaluation task contributes to the recency effect. INFORMATION ORDER EFFECTS Early research on information order effects found that the order in which a series of cues was presented could impact how they were evaluated. However, these results were inconsistent, sometimes finding greater sensitivity to earlier cues (the primacy effect; Nisbett & Ross, 1980), to later cues (the recency effect; Anderson, 1981; Davis, 1984), or to a mix of both (Murdock, 1962). The belief-adjustment model, proposed by Hogarth and Einhorn (1992), reconciled these findings by connecting the differing results to different combinations of the task’s characteristics: complexity, series length, consistency of information, response mode (evaluating at the end of the series or after each cue), and the type of judgment (estimating a value or evaluating a hypothesis). Under this model, initial cues were used to develop an initial belief about the evaluation. Later cues were used to update this belief. However, the ways in which the initial and later cues contributed to this belief depended on the characteristics of the task. These task ORDER EFFECTS ON NON-FOCAL EVALUATIONS 7 characteristics proved predictive in applied domains, including auditing (Ashton & Ashton, 1988; Tubbs, Messier, & Knechel, 1990) and amongst Patriot Air Defense officers (Adelman & Bresnick, 1992; Adelman, Tolcott, & Bresnick, 1993). These studies suggested that important, practical decisions could be influenced by the order in which the information was presented. Further research, however, has suggested that the original belief-adjustment model did not capture all task characteristics relevant to real-world decision making. A follow-up study on Patriot Air Defense officers found evidence of primacy when the meaning of later cues could be reinterpreted, rather than recency as the belief-adjustment model would have predicted (Adelman, Bresnick, Christian, Gualtieri, & Minionis, 1998). Stopping decisions are characterized by a split in focus between the focal task and the non-focal evaluation. To date, order effects studies have not explicitly considered this focal and non-focal split as a task characteristic. Research in working memory (Baddeley, 1992, 2000; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), however, suggests that a split in focus may impact how we process information and thus how cues are integrated into stopping decision evaluations. WORKING MEMORY AND STOPPING DECISIONS Working memory describes our ability to maintain and process information. Greater working memory availability has been linked to better performance. For example, people with higher working memory capacity demonstrate greater controlled attention (Engle, 2002; Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999), and people perform better when faced with low task loads (Anderson, Reder, & Lebiere, 1996; Gonzalez, 2005). ORDER EFFECTS ON NON-FOCAL EVALUATIONS 8 In a study where U.S. Navy officers were asked to categorize unidentified planes, high task load was associated with lower information recall regarding planes viewed as non-threatening (Perrin, Barnett, Walrath, & Grossman, 2001). This selective focus may have been adaptive, leading to devoting more attention to the threatening cues. For subsurface coal mining, however, this may lead to neglecting cues that only appear nonthreatening. Besides neglecting information, limited working memory may also lead us to be more selective in information processing. For example, research in hypothesis generation links constraints on working memory to decreases in the number of hypotheses that are generated and pursued (Dougherty & Hunter, 2003; Flin, Stewart, & Slaven 1996;