Can People Perceive Rate of Alternation

in Binary Choice Tasks?

Ujjval Pamnani, Krishna P. Miyapuram
Center for Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar

OBJECTIVE RESULTS
Investigate the dynamics of choice responses given that people Repeated measures ANOVA (3 conditions x 4 blocks)
explore and/or exploit patterns in a sequence of events
Base Rate: No significant main effect of condition and blocks for
Manipulate the transition probability a.k.a. rate of alternation both cards and coin session
between two successive events in a sequence keeping the base
rate of occurrence of an event constant

Three levels of transition probability: switch (0.25), balanced

(0.50), and stay (0.75)

INTRODUCTION
Often people report perceiving relation between successive Transition Rate: In the coin task, significant main effects of the
events even when the events were random. The judgments made condition | F(2,36)=4.543 with p=0.017 (alpha=0.05)
based on this phenomenon are famously known as gambler’s
fallacy and hot hand fallacy (Ayton & Fischer, 2004; Oskarsson et.al, 2009).

People employ different strategies in an attempt to discover

pattern in a random sequence (Gaissmaier & Schooler, 2008).

Probability Matching: subjects predict the events in the

proportion of occurrence

Maximizing: subjects always predict the more probable event

Koehler & James (2009) found that people show probability

matching behavior even when it is not possible to identify or
exploit outcome patterns.

Our study investigates how people would respond when there is

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION
Participants match probability (base rate) regardless of the
actually a statistical relation between successive events.
alternation patterns in each block as expected

Transition Probability in choice response would reveal pattern

detection on the assumption that feedback at every trial about win
or loss would influence choice response in subsequent trials
EXPERIMENT DESIGN
Although we have significant main effect in the coin session, the
absolute difference between conditions in the transition
probability of choice responses is small.

Representativeness Heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972)

A sample of two events is representative of the statistical property
of the sequence
Suggests pattern discovery but we did not find considerable
evidence suggesting inability to learn statistical dependencies

Other confounding factors in the experimental design such as

fewer number of trials per block, i.e. lack of extensive training
required for probability learning (Shanks et.al., 2002)

Future Work will include developing computational models

investigating the dynamics of choice responses along with win /
lose parameters (learning in a block and its progression)

References
Ayton, P., & Fischer, I. (2004). The hot hand fallacy and the gambler’s fallacy: two faces of subjective randomness? Memory &
Cognition, 32(8), 1369–1378.
Gaissmaier, W., & Schooler, L. J. (2008). The smart potential behind probability matching. Cognition, 109(3), 416–422.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1972). Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness. Cognitive Psychology.
Koehler, D. J., & James, G. (2009). Probability matching in choice under uncertainty: Intuition versus deliberation. Cognition,
113(1), 123–127.
Oskarsson, A. T., Van Boven, L., McClelland, G. H., & Hastie, R. (2009). What’s next? Judging sequences of binary events.
Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 262–285.
Shanks, D. R., Tunney, R. J., & McCarthy, J. D. (2002). A Re-Examination of Probability Matching and Rational Choice. Journal of
Behavioral Decision Making, 15(3), 233–250.