Influences of familiarity and recollection on value-based decision-making

We regularly retrieve information from memory to inform decisions in daily life. For example, when choosing a place to eat, we may be enticed by a brand name because of its familiarity or drawn to an independent restaurant because of recollections of a delicious lunch we had there once before. Despite the centrality of memory in such everyday choices, it remains unclear how these different memory processes (i.e., familiarity versus recollection) interact during value judgment and decision-making. Here we describe a novel experimental paradigm that tests the contributions of these processes to risk-based choice. In this task, participants had to retrieve the source of an image from an earlier encoding task to infer the probability of a bet being rewarded. Some images were repeated multiple times at encoding, while others only appeared once and others were lures that never appeared during the encoding task. We examined behavior in this task across two experiments, one conducted fully online and the second both online and in-laboratory. We found that subjective value increased with familiarity during memory-based decision-making. Betting on lure items even increased with false familiarity. Further, we observed evidence that familiarity and source value information interacted, such that the relationship of both familiarity and source value information with betting were increased when both were high. Our results highlight the importance of subjective familiarity in decision-making and potentially indirectly increasing the value of information retrieved from source memory.