Cite: Doroc, K., Yadav, N., Murawski, C. (2025). Complex decision-making under stress: shallower search and impaired decision quality at different levels of computational hardness. Communications Psychology. 

Key finding: People have reduced decision quality in the knapsack task (a complex budgeting task) when under acute stress. Exploratory behavioural and gaze tracking analyses revealed that this impairment under stress only occurs alongside time pressure, when the maximum available time is used on a trial,  and that it's accompanied by a shallower pattern of information search. Read more...

Cite: Doroc, K., Yadav, N., Pike, K., Murawski, C., Franco, J.P. (2025). Cognitive decline, not age, explains reduced decision-making capacity in healthy older adults. Preprint: PsyArXiv.

Key finding: Healthy older adults have significantly reduced decision quality in the knapsack task (a complex task that can model budgeting and time management), relative to younger adults. This effect appears to be explained by deficits in basic cognitive abilities, such as working memory, set shifting, and processing speed, and not age, education, motivation, or affect. Surprisingly, the largest differences in decision quality between age groups occurred on trials with lower computational demands. Read more...

Cite: Doroc, K., Yadav, N., Franco, J. P., Murawski, C. (2024). Does perceived chronic stress really impair decision-making capacity? Evidence when deciding under varying computational demands. Preprint: PsyArXiv.

Key finding: In a (somewhat) representative sample of US adults aged 18-65, perceived chronic stress had no credible effect on performance in a decision-making task, and small or no effect on performance in tasks assessing basic cognitive abilities. Read more...

Cite: Franco, J.P., Doroc, K., Yadav, N. et al. Task-independent metrics of computational hardness predict human cognitive performance. Sci Rep 12, 12914 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-16565-w

Key finding: Generic measures of how hard instances of the Knapsack problem (a budgeting task) are, drawn from computational complexity theory, generalise to predict human performance on the Travelling Salesperson (a spatial navigation task) and the 3-satisfiability (an abstract logic task) problems. Read more...