Attentional processes underlying health state valuation with time trade-off and standard gamble tasks
通过在线实验记录被试在时间权衡和标准博弈任务中的注意力分配，发现注意模式差异可解释两种方法对同一健康状态评估结果的差异，对理解偏好构建机制有启示。
Time Trade-Off (TTO) and Standard Gamble (SG) tasks are commonly used methods to measure utilities for health states (e.g., diabetes, being in a wheelchair). Importantly, however, the two methods have been shown to typically yield discrepant utilities for a given health state. Here we examine the cognitive processes underlying this utility gap by analyzing individuals' attentional patterns when evaluating health states in the TTO and SG tasks. In an online experiment, each respondent completed both a TTO and an SG task and we used the process-tracing methodology Mouselab to record respondents' attention allocation to the tasks' attributes: health states and their durations (in both TTO and SG), and probabilities (in SG only). In the TTO task, attention was approximately balanced between the health state and duration attributes, whereas in the SG task, attention was focussed on the probability and the health state attributes. Individuals who paid more attention to the task-specific trade-off attribute (i.e., duration and probability in TTO and SG, respectively) seemed to be less willing to make those trade-offs, leading to higher utilities for the health states. Notably, the utility gap was associated with individual differences in attention allocation: respondents who adjusted their attention allocation less to the task-specific trade-offs produced more discrepant utilities between the TTO and SG tasks. Our findings underscore the key role of attentional processes in preference construction, highlighting that differences in the utilities people assign to health states could potentially be influenced by altering attention allocation.