Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Washington Road, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
Department of Economics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA.
Nat Commun. 2017 Jun 27;8:15958. doi: 10.1038/ncomms15958.
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.
我们提供的证据表明，决策是通过回忆个人过去的经验来做出的，并且这个过程可以通过偶然的提醒来偏向于过去的选择。首先，在一个标准的奖励选择任务中，我们表明，一种在决策时使用过去结果的个体样本来估计价值的模型比经典的增量学习模型更能拟合选择和与决策相关的神经活动。在第二个实验中，我们通过偶然提醒参与者个人过去的决策来偏向这个抽样过程。在提醒后做出的下一个决策受到所采取的行动和在提醒试验中获得的价值的强烈影响。这些结果为一种决策架构提供了新的实证支持，该架构依赖于个体过去选择事件的样本，而不是对选项进行增量平均奖励，这对潜在的认知和神经机制具有启示意义。
