When judging the quality of a manuscript or a student’s performance in class, people often rely on multiple pieces of information such as the novelty of the results, clarity of style and the soundness of the methods. Understanding and predicting how people integrate these pieces of information for decisions or judgments has been the goal of psychological research. Fur this purpose researchers have tested models to capture the judgment process. However, how judgments connect to basic cognitive capacities such as memory or attention is often neglected. In particular, in regard to memory this could be a grave mistake, as our judgments crucially depend on the knowledge we have acquired about the world. Judgment and decision processes most probably rely on cognitive capacities such as working memory or attention that shape the cognitive processes. For example, they provide limits for the amount of information that can be processed. By exploring the connection between cognitive models and their memory foundations we will develop a better understanding of judgment and decision making.

The present research projects aims to contribute to closing this gap in the literature by linking judgment processes with different memory processes such as working memory, episodic, and implicit memory. We investigate how memory affects judgment and how this influences task performance. We will investigate how solving a judgment problem depends on the cognitive resources of the decision maker. We will tackle these questions by linking judgment processes with cognitive processes proposed in the related field of categorization. Contrary to the research on judgments, the categorization literature has been dominated by memory-based models and thus has extensively studied how these processes are linked with memory. Bringing together these two fields seems to be a promising approach. More specifically, Study 1 investigates how different memory systems such as working memory and episodic memory correlate with performance in different categorization and judgment tasks. Studies 2 and 3 focus on how reduced working memory capacity and the structure of a task influences the way people approach a judgment task and their subsequent judgment performance. Finally, in Study 4 we will go one step further and investigate how genetic polymorphisms that have been connected with memory performance influence higher-order cognitive processes such as categorization and judgment.

In sum, by studying how judgment processes are related to memory we will contribute to a better understanding of how basic cognitive processes interact with higher-order cognitive processes such as judgment and categorization. Finally, by exploring how interindividual differences in basic cognitive processes and higher-order cognition are connected with genetic differences, we hope to open up new ways of understanding the neural underpinnings of judgment and categorization.