Adaptivity and Judgment in Rule Verification Tasks: An Empirical Investigation

Recent studies of decision making have suggested that the poor performance typically demonstrated by traditional decision making research is due not to failures on the part of the human, but failures of the empirical studies to test performance in representative situations. In particular, some researchers have studied how experience in an uncertain environment can improve performance. We describe research designed to test the effect of explicit environmental experience on performance on a rule verification task. Participants performed a rule verification task after receiving related experience in the task environment. Results indicated that performance was very similar to that on traditional tasks of this type, in contrast to research which suggested that knowledge of uncertainty should impact performance.