Biological Psychology of Decision Making, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany.
Nat Commun. 2020 Jul 3;11(1):3318. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17192-7.
Decision-making is guided by memories of option values. However, retrieving items from memory renders them malleable. Here, we show that merely retrieving values from memory and making a choice between options is sufficient both to induce changes to stimulus-reward associations in the hippocampus and to bias future decision-making. After allowing participants to make repeated choices between reward-conditioned stimuli, in the absence of any outcome, we observe that participants prefer stimuli they have previously chosen, and neglect previously unchosen stimuli, over otherwise identical-valued options. Using functional brain imaging, we show that decisions induce changes to hippocampal representations of stimulus-outcome associations. These changes are correlated with future decision biases. Our results indicate that choice-induced preference changes are partially driven by choice-induced modification of memory representations and suggest that merely making a choice - even without experiencing any outcomes - induces associative plasticity.
决策是由对选项价值的记忆引导的。然而，从记忆中检索项目会使它们变得易于塑造。在这里，我们表明，仅仅从记忆中检索值并在选项之间做出选择，就足以引起海马体中刺激-奖励关联的变化，并影响未来的决策。在允许参与者在没有任何结果的情况下，反复在奖励条件刺激之间做出选择之后，我们观察到参与者更喜欢他们之前选择过的刺激，而忽略了之前未选择过的刺激，而不是选择其他具有相同价值的选项。使用功能脑成像，我们表明，决策会引起海马体中刺激-结果关联的表示发生变化。这些变化与未来的决策偏差相关。我们的结果表明，选择引起的偏好变化部分是由记忆表示的选择引起的修改驱动的，这表明即使不经历任何结果，仅仅做出选择也会引起联想可塑性。
