I am honoured to have received the Alan B. Milne Prize for the highest-rated psychology bachelor’s thesis at the University of Aberdeen, the Henry Prize for achieving the top course grades among psychology students, and to be currently nominated for an undergraduate award from the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS). I am deeply grateful to my academic supervisors and to my friends (especially those at BECYCLE Aberdeen) who have supported me throughout my undergrad, and I remain profoundly thankful for the exceptional research opportunities, both local and international, that the University of Aberdeen has made possible.
I am especially grateful to Dr Basile Garcia’ interesting paper ‘Experiential values are underweighted in decisions involving symbolic options’ published in 2023 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01496-3), which formed the foundation of my thesis. His work revealed a novel cognitive bias; a neglect of experiential (learned) information in favour of symbolic (explicitly stated) information, even when both formats conveyed the same underlying economic incentive. In a series of experiments Garcia showed that participants consistently preferred symbolic options with clearly displayed probabilities over equally profitable experiential options learned through reinforcement learning. The preference remained after controlling for memory accuracy, ambiguity, and payoff size, implying that symbolic and experiential values draw on separate cognitive systems and that people trust explicit numbers more, even when it costs them money.
To probe this bias in hybrid decisions, I employed the attentional drift-diffusion model (aDDM; Krajbich et al., 2010), a hierarchical sequential-sampling framework that jointly fits reaction times, accuracy, and gaze to quantify how attention scales subjective value. Extending the standard DDM, it allows moment-to-moment evidence for each option to accumulate toward a decision bound, with the drift rate multiplicatively boosted whenever that option is fixated.
Adopting a recent modelling approach similar to Ting and Gluth (2025; see https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-76022-001), I focused on overall option value (defined as the sum of the values of all options displayed on screen) and asked whether it is processed differently across decision contexts. Ting and Gluth showed that higher overall value speeds decisions, raises accuracy, and reduces the influence of gaze on choice, though this reduction differs between contexts, varying across preferential, and perceptual tasks. Employing a variation of Dr Garcia’s experimental paradigm, I found that in decisions between experiential options visual attention strongly predicted choice, but the effect weakened as overall option value increased (theta à 1). However, in hybrid choices where participants selected between a symbolic and an experiential option, I observed the opposite pattern. The longer participants gazed at the experiential option, the more likely they were to choose the symbolic one (ca. 60 %) revealing a surprising negative link between gaze and choice counter to the aDDM’s assumptions. Currently I am investigating why hybrid decisions trigger an unusual gaze pattern, hoping to uncover new gaze-memory tactics for judging values across contexts.
The School would like to congratulate Veronika on her graduation and wish them the very best in the future!
