"Many of the actions we take depend on being able to make selections among many alternatives or even along a continuum. However, our understanding of the decision processes underlying these selections is sparse, largely due to a traditional focus on developing models of binary decisions. Recent forays into modeling multi-alternative decisions have been forced to build in relations between representations of available alternatives. In this paper, I propose and test a general framework for modeling decisions between arbitrarily large numbers of alternatives that naturally incorporates psychological relationships between the representations of available alternatives. In the first study, I construct and evaluate the basic components of a model of this process by establishing benchmark empirical phenomena for decisions on a continuum. In the second study, I examine how the number of alternatives and the relations between them affect representations and the components of the decision process. Taken together, this paper establishes benchmark empirical results in a new choice domain (continuous selection), proposes and tests a new modeling framework that accounts for these phenomena, and brings together decision and representation models in order to develop an over-arching theory of how people make decisions among many alternatives."--Page ii.
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