Is the description-experience gap a gap in attention?

Preferences in risky choice often differ systematically depending on whether people learn about the options based on abstract descriptions of outcomes and probabilities (decisions from description), or by repeatedly sampling the options' payoff distributions (decisions from experience). This description-experience gap is often formalized in terms of differences in the weighting of probabilistic events between description and experience. However, it is not clear how such differences might come about. Here we test a mechanistic, attentional account of differences choice behavior and probability weighting between description and experience. We demonstrate that people attend systematically more to risky options (vs. safe options) in experience compared to description. Attending more to the safe option was linked to a higher tendency to choose this option in both paradigms. Moreover, attention allocation was linked to the elevation and curvature of probability weighting functions in experience and in description. Therefore, differences in attention allocation between description and experience mediated differences in choice behavior and probability weighting between the paradigms. These analyses offer a novel process-based understanding of how the ways in which people learn about risky prospects may shape attention allocation, and thereby give rise to differences in preferences and probability weighting patterns indicative of a description-experience gap.