Practical planning and decision-making problems are often better and more accurately formulated with multiple conflicting objectives rather than a single objective. This study investigates a situation relevant for Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) as well as Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization (EMO), where the decision-maker needs to make a series of choices between nondominated options characterized by multiple objectives. The cognitive capacity of humans is limited, which leads to cognitive burden that influences human decision-makers’ decisions. We measure how the varying number of objectives influences cognitive burden in a laboratory study, and the impacts that this burden has on the decision-makers’ behavior and the consistency of their decisions. We use psychophysiological, behavioral, and self-report methods. Our results suggest that a higher number of objectives (i) increases cognitive burden significantly, (ii) leads to adopting strategies in which only a limited number of objectives is considered, and (iii) decreases decision consistency.

中文翻译：

---

许多相互冲突的目标对决策者认知负担和决策一致性的影响


实际的规划和决策问题通常更好、更准确地表述为多个相互冲突的目标，而不是单一的目标。本研究调查了与多标准决策 （MCDM） 和进化多目标优化 （EMO） 相关的情况，其中决策者需要在以多个目标为特征的非主导选项之间做出一系列选择。人类的认知能力是有限的，这导致了影响人类决策者决策的认知负担。在实验室研究中，我们衡量了不同数量的目标如何影响认知负担，以及这种负担对决策者的行为和决策一致性的影响。我们使用心理生理学、行为学和自我报告的方法。我们的结果表明，更多的目标 （i） 显着增加认知负担，（ii） 导致采用只考虑有限数量目标的策略，以及 （iii） 降低决策一致性。