Heightened risk aversion and less deterministic choices for visual versus auditory decision-making

Aversion to risks and losses biases our decision-making. In turn, aversion to risk and loss can be biased by whether information is taken visually or aurally. However, little research to date has directly compared risk and loss aversion behaviour between visual and auditory decision-making and which higher-order mechanisms might drive differences. Here, 104 participants completed an economic decision-making task, allocated to either visual or auditory conditions. Participants selected between ‘certain’ and ‘gamble’ monetary choices and their behaviour modelled using MCMC and hierarchical Bayesian modelling to derive individual and group-level parameter estimates for risk aversion, loss aversion and choice consistency. We find a tendency for individuals presented with visual information to be more risk averse, but less deterministic in their choices compared to those presented with auditory information. No such differences were obtained in loss averse behaviour. These results suggest heightened preference for certainty over uncertainty for the written word compared to the spoken word, and support the argument that these sensory modalities have partially independent processors. Self-reported measures of cognitive load were recorded post-task and while no significant group-level differences were found between conditions, increased subjective cognitive load was associated with heightened risk aversion in the visual but not auditory condition.