Visual anchoring in financial decision making in patients with Parkinson’s disease: an eye tracking study

Financial decisions are an essential part of people life and understanding the impact of cognitive deficits on financial choice is crucial to ensure consumers’ protection. To improve financial decisions, authorities worldwide are introducing disclosure documents. In the information processing phase, subjects have been shown to anchor their visual attention and their evaluation to the source of information placed in the top part of the documents. Executive functions play a crucial role in decision making and it has long been known that Parkinson’s disease (PD) disrupts the striatal dopamine system leading to dysfunctions in cortico-striatal- thalamic-cortical circuitries, thus, people with PD experience problems with value learning and may report difficulties in frontal executive functions from the early stages of the disease. The present research aims to test whether PD subjects are more prone than healthy controls to rely on the visual anchoring heuristic when comparing bank accounts as synthesized by the Payment Account Fees Information Documents (FID). To do so, we compared the oculomotor patterns, as measured by the eye-tracking methodology, of non-demented people with PD (n=49) to those of age-matched healthy controls. Data revealed that, compared to controls, PD patients exhibit a higher latency in starting to visually explore the document but a more impulsive behaviour in completing the entire visual scan of both the prospectuses. On average, PD patients tend to fail more often to recognize the advantageous product, especially when the cost items displayed in the top part of the document are lower, i.e., they are more prone to make biased financial choices. Results also showed that NonMotor Symptom Scale, MoCA, UPDRS total, and Beck Depression Inventory are clinical predictors of the reliance on the anchoring heuristics. Results are relevant given that non demented people with PD represent a large and growing part of the population engaged in financial decisions. Irrespective of age or disease duration, they may exhibit an increased tendency towards biased decisions, thus financial regulators should consider the susceptibility of frail and elderly people to visual biases when devising the format of financial prospectuses.