The WReSt Heuristic: The Role of Recall as Well as Feature–Importance in and Beyond the Cancellation and Focus Model

Recall combined with feature–importance is introduced as the underlying process of the Cancellation and Focus model and of preference judgments in general. Various memory–based process models are tested and evaluated in a series of three studies. Mere recall was not sufficient in predicting participants' preference ratings. However, two models in which recall was weighted by feature–importance were able to explain a significant part of the variance. These results were found not only in the first study, where they demonstrated a strong Cancellation and Focus effect, but also in the second study although here the effect was much weaker. Even using a slightly modified paradigm in the third study, in which the effect completely disappeared, these models maintained their predictive power. Surprisingly, our proposed fast and frugal Weighted Recalled Stepwise Comparing (WReSt) heuristic was able to predict preference ratings across the three studies just as well as the more complex and rational model Recalled Weighted Adding. Therefore, the WReSt heuristic is preferred.