ABSTRACT
The effects of feedback have been investigated in a wide range of judgment and decision-making tasks (e.g., see Harvey & Fischer, 2005 for a discussion of the role of feedback in confidence judgment, probability estimation and advice-taking tasks), but in keeping with the focus of chapter 3, in the first part of this chapter we examine primarily the evidence from multiple-cue probability learning (MCPL) tasks. In the second part of the chapter we take a more integrative view by considering how all the separate stages of judgment are combined. We note that the environments in which we make decisions are typically not controlled by ‘static’ rules ensuring that properties of the environment remain constant (as they are in many laboratory tasks), but are usually dynamic and require us to anticipate and learn to control changes in those environments. Feedback is particularly important in these situations and so we consider attempts to investigate how feedback interacts with the other stages of decision making in real-time ‘dynamic’ tasks. We also look at ways in which our understanding of the stages can be used to analyse decisions made in real-world naturalistic settings, such as those made by fire-fighters.
