Adaptive decision-making requires that environmental contingencies between decision options and their relative advantages and disadvantages be assessed accurately and quickly. The research presented in this article addresses the challenging notion that contingencies may be more visible from...

Regularities in the environment are used to decide what course of action to take and how to prepare for future events. Here we focus on the utilization of regularities for prediction and argue that the commonly considered measure of regularity - the strength of the contingency between antecedent...

The information used in reaching a decision between alternatives is often gleaned through samples drawn from the distributions of their outcomes. Since in most cases it is the direction of the difference in value, rather than its magnitude, that is of primary interest, the decision maker may...

Subjective correlation judgments that exaggerate or distort the objectively presented contingency between two variables in a series of stimulus observations are usually referred to as illusory correlations (IC). An empirical review reveals many different variants of ICs in diverse paradigms. Two...

The strength of decision routines was manipulated within a computer controlled micro-world simulation which required that participants make recurrent acquisition and disposal decisions. One week after having learned weak or strong routines, participants were confronted with changes in this...