Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 3, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Recognition is used as one cue among others in judgment and decision making
1Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Koln, Germany. tobias.richter@uni-koeln.de
Abstract:
Three experiments with paired comparisons were conducted to test the non-compensatory character of the recognition heuristic (D. G. Goldstein & G. Gigerenzer, 2002) in judgment and decision making. Recognition and knowledge about the recognized alternative were manipulated. In Experiment 1, participants were presented pairs of animal names where the task was to select the animal with the larger population. In Experiment 2, participants chose the safer 1 out of 2 airlines, and 3 knowledge cues were varied simultaneously. Recognition effects were partly compensated by task-relevant knowledge. The compensatory effects were additive. Decisions were slower when recognition and knowledge were incongruent. In Experiment 3, compensatory effects of knowledge and recognition were found for the city-size task which had originally been used to demonstrate the non-compensatory character of the recognition heuristic. These results suggest that recognition information is not used in an all-or-none fashion but is integrated with other types of knowledge in judgment and decision making.
Related Concept Videos
The Availability Heuristic
The Representativeness Heuristic
Decision Making: Traditional Method
First, a specific claim about the population parameter is decided based on the research question and is stated in a simple form. Further, an opposing statement to this claim is also stated. These statements can act as null and alternative hypotheses, out of which a null hypothesis would be a...
Decision Making
Automatic decision-making is fast, intuitive, and relies on gut feelings...
Non-Verbal Cues
First Impression

