Multicriteria Decision. Tradeoff. Behavioral aspects. Neuroscience. EEG.
A multicriteria decision model has well-defined mathematical aspects, however, behavioral aspects related to the human unconscious and individual experiences of the decision maker, during the preference elicitation procedure, are not considered. In this context, the present study explored, with the aid of the electroencephalogram (EEG), the cognitive and behavioral aspects throughout the steps of the Tradeoff Decision Support System procedure, comparing the subjects' brain activity when they were doing the elicitation, with the brain activity of when they were subjected to mathematical operations, capturing cognitive effort, and when they viewed different music clips, capturing brain activities of intuitive association. For data analysis, was used the t test, the Alpha Frontal Asymmetry Function and the Pope Function, which respectively compare the samples pair by pair, analyzes cognitive engagement in addition and captures task engagement, also, each analysis was complemented with the study of the Shift Function, which generates graphs with robust statistical inferential. The result of the statistical analysis suggests that the first stage of the tradeoff, bisection, is the one that requires the greatest cognitive effort on the part of the decision maker, in addition, signs of intuitive association are noticeable during the procedure, indicating tiredness and mental dispersion. Engagement analyzes suggest that decision makers had low task engagement and a cognitive engagement similar to watching a music clip, indicating that decision makers would be doing the elicitation more automatically and less consciously, which may be a justification for the high rate inconsistencies inherent to the procedure. Thus, as a conclusion, it is possible to relate the calculation and music steps to Tradeoff steps, identifying the cognitive effort inherent to the process, as well as a more automatic decision-making state. In addition, it was possible to extract insights and contributions to obtain more consistent results in the elicitation, from guidelines focused on the decision maker, the analyst and improvements in the Decision Support System (DSS).