Tohidi-Moghaddam Maryam, Tsetsos Konstantinos
Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.
Department of Psychology and Hamburg Center of Neuroscience, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Commun Psychol. 2025 Apr 5;3(1):56. doi: 10.1038/s44271-025-00229-2.
The way humans and other animals represent the values of alternatives is context-dependent, as it can be distorted by inferior alternatives that are immediately available for choice (immediate context); or that were encountered in previous episodes (temporal context). Yet, the extent to which the immediate and temporal context (co-) shape context-dependent valuation remains unclear. Here, we asked human participants (onsite: N = 30, online: N = 68) to learn the values associated with three alternatives and explicitly report these values before making binary and ternary choices among the alternatives. We show that context-dependent valuation is evident in the pre-choice value estimates and manifests equally in binary and ternary choices. Accordingly, we conclude that value representations are modulated by the temporal (and not the immediate) context. The direction and across-participants variability of this modulation cannot be captured by extant normalization theories but by a mechanism constructing values through sequential binary comparisons.
人类和其他动物表征备选方案价值的方式取决于情境，因为它可能会被可供立即选择的较差备选方案（即时情境）或在先前事件中遇到的备选方案（时间情境）所扭曲。然而，即时情境和时间情境在多大程度上（共同）塑造情境依赖型估值仍不清楚。在这里，我们让人类参与者（现场：N = 30，在线：N = 68）学习与三个备选方案相关的价值，并在对备选方案进行二元和三元选择之前明确报告这些价值。我们表明，情境依赖型估值在选择前的价值估计中很明显，并且在二元和三元选择中同样表现出来。因此，我们得出结论，价值表征受时间（而非即时）情境的调节。这种调节的方向和参与者之间的变异性无法用现有的归一化理论来解释，而可以用一种通过顺序二元比较构建价值的机制来解释。
