Covert attention leads to fast and accurate decision making

Decision makers are regularly faced with more choice information than they can directly gaze at in alimited amount of time. Many theories assume that because decision makers attend to informationsequentially and overtly that is, with direct gaze, they must respond to information overload bytrading off between speed and decision accuracy. By re-analyzing five published studies, we showthat participants, besides using overt attention, also use covert attention. That is, without beinginstructed to do so participants attend to information without direct gaze to evaluate choice attributesthat lead them to either choose the best or reject the worst option. We show that the use of covertattention is common for most participants and more so when information is easily identifiable inthe peripheral visual field due to being large or visually salient. Covert attention is associatedwith faster decision times suggesting that participants might process multiple pieces of informationsimultaneously using distributed attention. Our findings highlight the importance of covert attentionin decision making and show how decision makers may be gaining speed while retaining high levelsof decision accuracy. We discuss how harnessing covert attention can benefit consumer decisionmaking of healthy and sustainable products.