Primacy Effects in Extended Cognitive Strategy Choice: Initial Speed Benefits Outweigh Later Speed Benefits

Abstract

Background Human performers often recruit environment-based assistance to acquire or process information, such as relying on a smartphone app, a search engine, or a conversational agent. To make informed choices between several of such extended cognitive strategies, performers need to monitor the performance of these options. Objective In the present study, we investigated whether participants monitor an extended cognitive strategy’s performance—here, speed—more closely during initial as compared to later encounters. Methods In three experiments, 737 participants were asked to first observe speed differences between two competing cognitive strategies—here, two competing algorithms that can obtain answers to trivia questions—and eventually choose between both strategies based on the observations. Results Participants were sensitive to subtle speed differences and selected strategies accordingly. Most remarkably, even when participants performed identically with both strategies across all encounters, the strategy with superior speed in the initial encounters was preferred. Worded differently, participants exhibited a technology-use primacy effect. Contrarily, evidence for a recency effect was weak at best. Conclusion These results suggest that great care is required when performers are first acquainted with novel ways to acquire or process information. Superior initial performance has the potential to desensitize the performer for inferior later performance and thus prohibit optimal choice. Application Awareness of primacy enables users and designers of extended cognitive strategies to actively remediate suboptimal behavior originating in early monitoring episodes.