RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 What’s past is present: Reminders of past choices bias decisions for reward in humans
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 033910
DO 10.1101/033910
A1 Aaron M. Bornstein
A1 Mel W. Khaw
A1 Daphna Shohamy
A1 Nathaniel D. Daw
YR 2015
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/12/08/033910.abstract
AB We provide evidence that decisions are made by consulting memories for individual past experiences, and that this process can be biased in favor 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.