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Published on: September 10, 2018
Reminders of past choices bias decisions for reward in humans
Aaron M Bornstein1, Mel W Khaw2, Daphna Shohamy3,4
1Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Washington Road, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
Abstract:
We provide evidence that decisions are made by consulting memories for individual past experiences, and that this process can be biased in favour of past choices using incidental reminders. First, in a standard rewarded choice task, we show that a model that estimates value at decision-time using individual samples of past outcomes fits choices and decision-related neural activity better than a canonical incremental learning model. In a second experiment, we bias this sampling process by incidentally reminding participants of individual past decisions. The next decision after a reminder shows a strong influence of the action taken and value received on the reminded trial. These results provide new empirical support for a decision architecture that relies on samples of individual past choice episodes rather than incrementally averaged rewards in evaluating options and has suggestive implications for the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms.
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