Alice Mason
Biased confabulation in risky choice
Mason, Alice; Madan, Christopher R.; Simonsen, Nick; Spetch, Marcia L.; Ludvig, Elliot A.
Authors
CHRISTOPHER MADAN CHRISTOPHER.MADAN@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Assistant Professor
Nick Simonsen
Marcia L. Spetch
Elliot A. Ludvig
Abstract
When people make risky decisions based on past experience, they must rely on memory. The nature of the memory representations that support these decisions is not yet well understood. A key question concerns the extent to which people recall specific past episodes or whether they have learned a more abstract rule from their past experience. To address this question, we examined the precision of the memories used in risky decisions-from-experience. In three pre-registered experiments, we presented people with risky options, where the outcomes were drawn from continuous ranges (e.g., 100–190 or 500–590), and then assessed their memories for the outcomes experienced. In two preferential tasks, people were more risk seeking for high-value than low-value options, choosing as though they overweighted the outcomes from more extreme ranges. Moreover, in two preferential tasks and a parallel evaluation task, people were very poor at recalling the exact outcomes encountered, but rather confabulated outcomes that were consistent with the outcomes they had seen and were biased towards the more extreme ranges encountered. This common pattern suggests that the observed decision bias in the preferential task reflects a basic cognitive process to overweight extreme outcomes in memory. These results highlight the importance of the edges of the distribution in providing the encoding context for memory recall. They also suggest that episodic memory influences decision-making through gist memory and not through direct recall of specific instances.
Citation
Mason, A., Madan, C. R., Simonsen, N., Spetch, M. L., & Ludvig, E. A. (2022). Biased confabulation in risky choice. Cognition, 229, Article 105245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105245
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Jul 27, 2022 |
Online Publication Date | Aug 9, 2022 |
Publication Date | Dec 1, 2022 |
Deposit Date | Aug 10, 2022 |
Publicly Available Date | Aug 10, 2022 |
Journal | Cognition |
Print ISSN | 0010-0277 |
Electronic ISSN | 1873-7838 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 229 |
Article Number | 105245 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105245 |
Keywords | Cognitive Neuroscience; Linguistics and Language; Developmental and Educational Psychology; Language and Linguistics; Experimental and Cognitive Psychology |
Public URL | https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/9900825 |
Publisher URL | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027722002335?via%3Dihub |
Files
1-s2.0-S0010027722002335-main
(4.8 Mb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
You might also like
Shock and awe: distinct effects of taboo words on lexical decision and free recall
(2017)
Journal Article
Priming memories of past wins induces risk seeking
(2014)
Journal Article
Temporal summation of global form signals in dynamic glass patterns
(2014)
Journal Article
High reward makes items easier to remember, but harder to bind to a new temporal context
(2012)
Journal Article
Cortical complexity as a measure of age-related brain atrophy
(2016)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Repository@Nottingham
Administrator e-mail: discovery-access-systems@nottingham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search