Glöckner and Bröder (2011) have shown that for 77.5% of their participants’ decision making behavior in decisions involving recognition information and explicitly provided additional cues could be better described by weighted-compensatory Parallel Constraint Satisfaction (PCS) Models than by non-compensatory strategies such as recognition heuristic (RH) or Take the Best (TTB). We investigate whether this predominance of PCS models also holds in memory-based decisions in which information retrieval is effortful and cognitively demanding. Decision strategies were analyzed using a maximum-likelihood strategy classification method, taking into account choices, response times and confidence ratings simultaneously. In contrast to the memory-based-RH hypothesis, results show that also in memory-based decisions for 62% of the participants behavior is best explained by a compensatory PCS model. There is, however, a slight increase in participants classified as users of the non-compensatory strategies RH and TTB (32%) compared to the previous study, mirroring other studies suggesting effects of costly retrieval.

Research on the processing of recognition information has focused on testing the recognition heuristic (RH). On the aggregate, the noncompensatory use of recognition information postulated by the RH was rejected in several studies, while RH could still account for a considerable proportion of choices. These results can be explained if either a) a part of the subjects used RH or b) nobody used it but its choice predictions were accidentally in line with predictions of the strategy used. In the current study, which exemplifies a new approach to model testing, we determined individuals’ decision strategies based on a maximum-likelihood classification method, taking into account choices, response times and confidence ratings simultaneously. Unlike most previous studies of the RH, our study tested the RH under conditions in which we provided information about cue values of unrecognized objects (which we argue is fairly common and thus of some interest). For 77.5% of the subjects, overall behavior was best explained by a compensatory parallel constraint satisfaction (PCS) strategy. The proportion of subjects using an enhanced RH heuristic (RHe) was negligible (up to 7.5%); 15% of the subjects seemed to use a take the best strategy (TTB). A more-fine grained analysis of the supplemental behavioral parameters conditional on strategy use supports PCS but calls into question process assumptions for apparent users of RH, RHe, and TTB within our experimental context. Our results are consistent with previous literature highlighting the importance of individual strategy classification as compared to aggregated analyses.