Both prosociality in group context and morality are important aspects of social life and living together with others in society. In both situations, understanding the cognitive processes underlying... Show moreBoth prosociality in group context and morality are important aspects of social life and living together with others in society. In both situations, understanding the cognitive processes underlying the decisions is argued to be a crucial step in designing evidence-based interventions addressing not only choice outcomes, but the driving forces of the choices as well. Using fine-grained and unobtrusive measure of cognitive processes in the decision process, eye tracking is applied in the investigation of cognitive processes in this dissertation. Chapter 2 investigated active ignorance to others’ group membership. Chapter 3 presented two eye tracking studies, in which the cognitive processes of prosociality in intergroup contexts were investigated. Chapter 4 reported a study investigating the cognitive processes underlying moral decisions, speaking to the theoretical debate in moral decision making, advocating a choice discriminability perspective over the dual process theory of moral judgment. The work demonstrates the merit of further illuminating the inner workings of the “black box” of decision making, by using process-tracking techniques to gain insights about decision processes that would have been difficult to achieve when only using choices. Moreover, the work presented here makes a methodological contribution by developing a standardizable and incentivized moral dilemma task Show less
The studies described in this thesis address a range of topics related to arousal, exploration, temporal attention, and the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system. Chapters 2 and 3 report... Show moreThe studies described in this thesis address a range of topics related to arousal, exploration, temporal attention, and the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system. Chapters 2 and 3 report two studies that investigated a recent theory about the role of the LC-NE system in the regulation of the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Chapter 4 reports a study on neurocognitive function in patients with dopamine-β-hydroxylase (DβH) deficiency. Chapter 5 reports an fMRI study on the neural correlates of perceptual curiosity. Chapter 6 and 7 reported several experiments investigating the effects of ‘accessory stimuli’ and temporal certainty on information processing, using scalp electrophysiology and sequential-sampling models of decision making. Taken together, the studies reported in this thesis suggest that arousal, exploration and temporal attention are closely related, which is likely due to a shared neural basis. Show less
