Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 8, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15958
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Funding
- National Institute of Mental Health [F31MH095501]
- John Templeton Foundation [57876]
- National Institute for Drug Abuse [R01DA038891]
- National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke [R01NS078784]
- James S. McDonnell foundation
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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.
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