Abstract

Can you remember the last time that memory was not involved, in some form or other, in a decision or judgment you had to make? When asked to predict the July temperature in your city on the occasion of an impending in-laws' visit, you probably recalled July temperatures over the last few years. When thinking about a new car, you probably retrieved car models you had recently seen and admired on the highway. When deliberating about the job offer from the East Coast, you might have remembered the good times you had in that city during college and weighed those memories against the traffic congestion and high housing prices you recalled from your recent visit there. Considering the prevalent use of memory at many decision stages — including the generation of feasible alternatives, the determination of the utility of different outcomes, and the prediction of the likelihood of outcomes — it may come as a surprise to nonspecialists in the area of human judgment and decision making (J/DM) that, with some notable exceptions, most models of decision or judgment performance do not explicitly combine considerations of memory processes and of the representation of information in memory with other stages of the decision process.

Citation

Weber, Elke, W. Goldstein, and S. Barlas. "And let us not forget memory: The role of memory processes and techniques in the study of judgment and choice." In Decision Making from a Cognitive Perspective, Volume 32: Advances in Research and Theory, 33-82. Ed. Jerome Busemeyer, Reid Hastie, and Douglas L. Medin. San Diego: Academic Press, 1995.

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