Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Woodstock Rd, Oxford, OX2 6GG, UK.
Nat Commun. 2020 Jul 9;11(1):3417. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-16964-5.
Deciding which options to engage, and which to forego, requires developing accurate beliefs about the overall distribution of prospects. Here we adapt a classic prey selection task from foraging theory to examine how individuals keep track of an environment's reward rate and adjust choices in response to its fluctuations. Preference shifts were most pronounced when the environment improved compared to when it deteriorated. This is best explained by a trial-by-trial learning model in which participants estimate the reward rate with upward vs. downward changes controlled by separate learning rates. A failure to adjust expectations sufficiently when an environment becomes worse leads to suboptimal choices: options that are valuable given the environmental conditions are rejected in the false expectation that better options will materialize. These findings offer a previously unappreciated parallel in the serial choice setting of observations of asymmetric updating and resulting biased (often overoptimistic) estimates in other domains.
决定选择哪些选项并放弃哪些选项需要对前景的总体分布有准确的信念。在这里，我们从觅食理论中改编了一个经典的猎物选择任务，以研究个体如何跟踪环境的奖励率并根据其波动调整选择。与环境恶化相比，当环境改善时，偏好转移最为明显。这可以通过一个试验学习模型来最好地解释，在该模型中，参与者根据单独的学习率来估计奖励率的向上和向下变化。当环境恶化时，如果不能充分调整预期，就会导致次优选择：在给定环境条件下有价值的选项会被拒绝，因为错误地期望会出现更好的选项。这些发现为其他领域观察到的非对称更新和由此产生的有偏差（通常过于乐观）估计的序列选择设置中的观察结果提供了一个以前未被认识到的平行。
