ESRI Seminar: "Why did I do that? Investigating Decision-Making Processes using Eyetracking and Computer-Mouse Tracking"

Speaker: Dr Denis O’Hora, Department of Psychology, NUIG

Denis O’Hora is an experimental psychologist who specialises in using experimental methods to investigate how people make decisions. His recent work showing how people’s motivations and decision-making processes are affected by the contexts in which their decisions are made has appeared in multiple international psychology journals. He has also published applied work in public health and organisational behaviour.

In our lives as consumers, workers, parents and so on, we have all made decisions that are suboptimal and wondered how it happened. In our research, we take advantage of detailed behavioural measurements to track the effects of decision-making processes. When thought processes occur while we engage in an action, it is possible for characteristics of these processes to influence the ongoing performance of those actions. That is, cognitive processes may 'leak' into motor processes, such that we veer towards choosing a tempting alternative to our final choice. We track eye movement and computer-mouse movement while people make simple choices in order to gain some insight on these thought processes. This seminar will introduce our approach to investigating decision-making and outline some research we have done on intertemporal choice and approach-avoidance conflict.