Does attention have a causal impact on risky decisions? We address this question in a preregistered experiment in which participants accept or reject a series of mixed gambles while exogenously varying how information can be sampled. Specifically, in each trial participants observe the outcomes of a mixed-gamble with gains and losses presented sequentially. To isolate the causal role of attention on the decision process, we manipulate for how long a specific attribute is presented before showing the next one (e.g., 600 ms/800 ms vs 400 ms). Our results partially...

Exploration is an important part of decision making and is crucial to maximizing long-term reward. Past work has shown that people use different forms of uncertainty to guide exploration. In this study, we investigate the role of the pupil-linked arousal system in uncertainty-guided exploration. We measured participants’ pupil dilation (N = 48) while they performed a two- armed bandit task. Consistent with previous work, we found that people adopted a hybrid of directed, random and undirected exploration, which are sensitive to relative uncertainty, total...

Model-based planning is thought to protect against over-reliance on habits. It is reduced in individuals high in compulsivity, but effect sizes are small and may depend on subtle features of the tasks used to assess it. We developed a diamond-shooting smartphone game that measures model-based planning in an at-home setting, and varied the game’s structure within and across participants to assess how it affects measurement reliability and validity with respect to previously established correlates of model-based planning, with a focus on compulsivity. Increasing the...

Data from N=149 participants who completed a gamified version of the two-step task under one of three conditions: (1) stimuli from both first- and second-state choices were randomly assigned to right/left positions on the screen on every trial; (2) stimuli from both first- and second-state choices were assigned fixed right/left positions on the screen (i.e., unchanging across trials); or (3) stimuli from first-state choices were randomly assigned to right/left positions on the screen on every trial. Second-state stimuli were assigned fixed...

Prior studies have found metacognitive impairments are linked to a transdiagnostic dimension of anxious-depression, manifesting as reduced confidence in performance (‘metacognitive bias’). However, previous work has been cross-sectional and so it is unclear if under-confidence is a trait-like marker of anxious-depression vulnerability, or if it resolves when anxious-depression improves. Data were collected as part of the ‘Precision in Psychiatry’ study, a large-scale transdiagnostic, four-week observational study of individuals initiating internet-based cognitive...

Computational models can offer mechanistic insight into cognition and therefore have the potential to transform our understanding of psychiatric disorders and their treatment. For translational efforts to be successful, it is imperative that computational measures capture individual characteristics reliably. To date, this issue has received little consideration. Here we examine the reliability of reinforcement learning and economic models derived from two commonly used tasks. Healthy individuals (N=50) completed a restless four-armed bandit and a calibrated...

An important finding in the cognitive effort literature has been that sensitivity to the costs of effort varies between individuals, suggesting that some people find effort more aversive than others. It has been suggested this may explain individual differences in other aspects of cognition; in particular that greater effort sensitivity may underlie some of the symptoms of conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. In this paper, we highlight a major problem with existing measures of cognitive effort that hampers this line of research, specifically the confounding...

Go/No-Go responses in visual search yield different estimates of the properties of visual search than more standard present and absent tasks. Such minor methodological tweaks have a surprisingly large effect on measures that have, for the last half-century or so, formed the backbone of prominent theories of visual attention. Secondly, priming effects in visual search have a dominating influence on visual search, accounting for effects that have been attributed to top-down guidance in standard theories. Priming effects in visual search have never been investigated...

Can synchrony in stimulation guide attention and aid perceptual performance? Here, in a series of three experiments, we tested the influence of visual and auditory synchrony on attentional selection during a visual foraging task. Experiment 1 was performed online, where the task was to forage for 10 (out of 20) vertical lines among 60 randomly oriented distractor lines that changed color between yellow and blue at random intervals. The targets either changed colors in visual synchrony or not. In another condition, a non-spatial sound additionally occurred synchronously...

Recently it has been suggested that parameters estimates of computational models can be used to understand individual differences at the process level. One area of research in which this approach, called computational phenotyping, took hold is computational psychiatry, but it is also used to understand differences in age and personality. One requirement for successful computational phenotyping is that behavior and parameters are stable over time. Surprisingly, the test-retest reliability of behavior and model parameters remains unknown for most experimental tasks and...

Theories of neural replay propose that it supports a range of functions, most prominently planning and memory consolidation. Here, we test the hypothesis that distinct signatures of replay in the same task are related to model-based decision-making (“planning”) and memory preservation. We designed a reward learning task wherein participants utilized structure knowledge for model-based evaluation, while at the same time had to maintain knowledge of two independent and randomly alternating task environments. Using magnetoencephalography and multivariate analysis, we first...

Humans excel at causal reasoning, yet at the same time consistently fail to respect its basic axioms. They seemingly fail to recognize, for instance, that only the direct causes of an event can affect its probability (the Markov condition). How can one explain this paradox? Here we argue that standard normative analyses of causal reasoning mostly apply to the idealized case where the reasoner has perfect confidence in her knowledge of the underlying causal model. Given uncertainty about the correct representation of a causal system, it is not always rational for a...

In reinforcement learning (RL) experiments, participants learn to make rewarding choices in response to different stimuli; RL models use outcomes to estimate stimulus–response values that change incrementally. RL models consider any response type indiscriminately, ranging from more concretely defined motor choices (pressing a key with the index finger), to more general choices that can be executed in a number of ways (selecting dinner at the restaurant). However, does the learning process vary as a function of the choice type? In Experiment 1, we show that it does:...

Reward improves memory through both encoding and consolidation processes. In this pre-registered study, we tested whether reward effects on memory generalize from rewarded items to unrewarded but episodically-related items. 59 human volunteers incidentally encoded associations between unique objects and repeated scenes. Some scenes typically yielded high reward, whereas others typically yielded low reward. Memory was tested immediately after encoding (n=29) or the next day (n=30). Overall, reward had only a limited influence on memory. It neither enhanced...

The rise of large-scale collaborative panel studies in educational psychology and cognitive neuroscience has generated a need for fast, reliable, and valid assessments of cognitive abilities. In these studies, a detailed characterization of participants’ cognitive abilities is often unnecessary. Tests are chosen based on their ease of use and the duration and feasibility of their administration. These demands often result in the use of abbreviated measures or even related proxies, potentially compromising the reliabilities and validities of those measures. The present...

Predictive inference is an important cognitive function and there are many tasks which measure it, and the error driven learning that underpins it. Context is a key contribution to this learning, with different contexts requiring different learning strategies. A factor not often considered however, is the conditions and time-frame over which a model of that context is developed. This study required participants to learn under two changing, unsignalled contexts with opposing optimal responses to large errors - change-points and oddballs. The changes in context occurred...

The purpose of exploration is to reduce goal-relevant uncertainty. This can be achieved by choosing to explore the parts of the environment one is most uncertain about. Humans, however, often choose to avoid uncertainty. How do humans balance approaching and avoiding uncertainty during exploration? To answer this question, we developed a task requiring participants to explore a simulated environment towards a clear goal. We compared human choices to the predictions of the optimal exploration policy and a hierarchy of simpler strategies. We found that participants...

Humans form complex societies in which we routinely engage in social decision-making regarding the allocation of resources among ourselves and others. One dimension that characterizes social decision-making in particular is whether to prioritize self-interest or respect for others-proself or prosocial. What causes this individual difference in social value orientation? Recent developments in the social dual-process theory argue that social decision-making is characterized by its underlying domain-general learning systems: the model-free and model-based systems. In line...

A large amount of literature demonstrates that social behaviour can be triggered by environmental cues. A long-standing debate involves the question of whether such stimuli trigger behaviour directly (i.e. habits) or whether these effects mediate goals. As studies on automatic goal pursuit typically use real-world cues that are already associated with the behaviour and potentially the goal, it is impossible to make strong claims about the nature of the effects. In the present paper, we use a paradigm inspired by the Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) literature to...

Why can initial biases persist in repeated choice tasks? Previous research has shown that frequent rewards can lure the decision maker into premature exploitation of a supposedly best option, which can result in the persistence of initial biases. Here, we demonstrate that even in the absence of rewards, initial biases can be perpetuated through a positive testing strategy. After eliciting a biased preference for one of two equally rewarding options, participants (N = 203) could sample freely from both options without the lure of any financial rewards. When...

Beliefs like the Gamblers Fallacy and the Hot Hand have interested cognitive scientists, economists, and philosophers for centuries. We propose that these judgment patterns arise from the observers mental models of the sequence-generating mechanism, moderated by the strength of belief in an a priori base rate. In six behavioral experiments, participants observed one of three mechanisms generating sequences of eight binary events: a random mechanical device, an intentional goal-directed actor, and a financial market. We systematically manipulated participants beliefs...

The valence of an individual’s emotional response to an event is often thought to depend on their prior expectations for the event: better-than-expected outcomes produce positive affect and worse-than-expected outcomes produce negative affect. In recent years, this hypothesis has been instantiated within influential computational models of subjective affect that assume the valence of affect is driven by reward prediction errors. However, there remain a number of open questions regarding this association. In this project, we investigated the moderating effects of outcome...

Catastrophizing, when an individual overestimates the probability of a severe negative outcome, is related to various aspects of mental ill-health. Here, we further characterize catastrophizing by investigating the extent to which self-reported catastrophizing is associated with risk-taking, using an online behavioural task and computational modelling. We performed two online studies: a pilot study (n = 69) and a main study (n = 263). In the pilot study, participants performed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), alongside two other tasks (reported in the...

Generating predictions about environmental regularities, relying on these predictions, and updating these predictions when there is a violation from incoming sensory evidence are considered crucial functions of our cognitive system for being adaptive in the future. The violation of a prediction can result in a prediction error (PE) which affects subsequent memory processing. In our preregistered studies, we examined the effects of different levels of PE on episodic memory. Participants were asked to generate predictions about the associations between sequentially...

Across four experiments, we manipulated features of a simple reaction time (RT) task to examine the effects of such features on vigilance. In Experiment 1, we created simple reaction time “game” that pitted participants against two computerized avatars. In one condition, participants were awarded points, while the other condition did not receive points. Performance in the two conditions did not differ, but both conditions showed faster RTs and shallower time-on-task performance decrements compared to a standard psychomotor vigilance task. In Experiment 2, we removed the...

Individuals differ in sensitivity to the adverse consequences of their actions, leading some to persist in maladaptive behaviours. Two pathways have been identified for this insensitivity: a motivational pathway based on reward valuation and a behavioural pathway based on stimulus–response mechanisms. Here we identify a third, cognitive pathway based on differences in punishment knowledge. Exposed to identical punishment contingencies, some people (Sensitive) form correct causal beliefs that guide their behaviour to avoid punishment, whereas others form incorrect causal...

Despite the fact that reliability estimation is crucial for robust inference, it is underutilized in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Appreciating reliability can help researchers increase statistical power, effect sizes, and reproducibility, decrease the impact of measurement error, and inform methodological choices. However, accurately calculating reliability for many experimental learning tasks is challenging. In this study, we highlight a number of these issues, and estimate multiple metrics of internal consistency and split-half reliability of a widely used...

Standard models of decision-making assume each option is associated with subjective value, regardless of whether this value is inferred from experience (experiential) or explicitly instructed probabilistic outcomes (symbolic). In this study, we present results that challenge the assumption of unified representation of experiential and symbolic value. Across nine experiments, we presented participants with hybrid decisions between experiential and symbolic options. Participants choices exhibited a pattern consistent with a systematic neglect of the experiential values....

Interval timing refers to the ability to perceive and remember intervals in the seconds to minutes range. Our contemporary understanding of interval timing is derived from relatively small-scale, isolated studies that investigate a limited range of intervals with a small sample size, usually based on a single task. Consequently, the conclusions drawn from individual studies are not readily generalizable to other tasks, conditions, and task parameters. The current paper presents a live database that presents raw data from interval timing studies (currently composed of 68...

People discount both future outcomes that could happen and past outcomes that could have happened according to how far away they are in time. A common finding is that future outcomes are often preferred to past ones when the payoffs and temporal distance (how long ago/until they occur) are matched, referred to as temporal value asymmetry. In this article, we examine the consistency of this effect by examining the effect of manipulating the magnitude and delays of past and future payoffs on participants’ choices and challenge the claim that differences in value are...

Humans are exposed to environmental and economic threats that can profoundly affect individual survival and group functioning. Although anecdotal evidence suggests that threat exposure can increase collective action, the effects of threat on decision-making have been mainly investigated at the individual level. Here we examine how threat exposure and concomitant physiological responses modulate cooperation in small groups. Individuals (N = 105, ages 18-34 years) in groups of three were exposed to threat of electric shocks while deciding how much to contribute to a...

Peer relationships and social belonging are particularly important during adolescence. Using a willingness-to-work paradigm to quantify incentive motivation, we examined whether evaluative information holds unique value for adolescents. Participants (N = 102; 12-23 years old) rated peers, predicted how peers rated them, and exerted physical effort to view each peer’s rating. We measured grip force, speed, and opt-out behavior to examine the motivational value of peer feedback, relative to money in a control condition, and to assess how peer desirability and...

In our connected era, we spend significant time and effort satisfying our curiosity. Often, we choose which information we seek, but sometimes the selection is made for us. We hypothesized that humans exhibit enhanced curiosity in the context of choice. We designed a task in which healthy participants saw two lotteries on each trial. On some trials, participants chose which lottery to play. On other trials, the lottery was selected for them. Participants then indicated their curiosity about the outcome of the to-be-played lottery via self-report ratings (Experiment 1, N...

The study of social learning examines how individuals learn from others by means of observation, imitation, or compliance with advice. However, it still remains largely unknown whether social learning processes have a distinct contribution to choice behavior, independent from non-social trial-and-error learning that often occurs simultaneously. 153 participants completed a reinforcement learning task, where they were asked to make choices to gain rewards. Advice from an artificial teacher was presented on 60% of the trials, allowing us to compare choice behavior with...

While making decisions, we often rely on past experiences to guide our choices. However, not all experiences are remembered equally well, and some elements of an experience are more memorable than others. Thus, the intrinsic memorability of past experiences may bias our decisions. Here, we hypothesized that individuals would tend to choose more memorable options than less memorable ones. We investigated the effect of item memorability on choice in two experiments. First, using food images, we found that the same items were consistently remembered, and others...

Decision-making behavior is often understood using the framework of evidence accumulation models (EAMs). Nowadays, EAMs are applied to various domains of decision-making with the underlying assumption that the latent cognitive constructs proposed by EAMs are consistent across these domains. In this study we investigate both the extent to which the parameters of EAMs are related between four different decision-making domains and across different time points. To that end, we make use of the novel joint modelling approach, that explicitly includes relationships between...

Decision-making involves weighing up the outcome likelihood, potential rewards, and effort needed. Previous research has focused on the trade-offs between risk and reward or between effort and reward. Here we bridge this gap and examine how risk in effort levels influences choice. With outcome uncertainty, people’s risk attitudes follow a fourfold pattern, varying with the domain (gains or losses) and probability (rare or common). Three experiments assessed people’s risk attitudes for money, physical effort, and mental effort. With monetary gambles, risk attitudes...

Protection often involves the capacity to prospectively plan the actions needed to mitigate harm. The computational architecture of decisions involving protection remains unclear, as well as whether these decisions differ from other beneficial prospective actions such as reward acquisition. Here we compare protection acquisition to reward acquisition and punishment avoidance to examine overlapping and distinct features across the three action types. Protection acquisition is positively valenced similar to reward. For both protection and reward, the more the actor gains,...

People who take on challenges and persevere longer are more likely to succeed in life. But individuals often avoid exerting effort, and there is limited experimental research investigating whether we can learn to value effort. Because existing research focuses on enhancing cognitive performance rather than increasing the value of effort, it also remains unclear whether individuals can learn to care more about challenging themselves than performing well. We developed a paradigm to test an intuitive idea: that people can learn to value effort and will seek effortful...

Pavlovian bias is an innate motivational tendency to approach rewards and remain passive in the face of punishment. The relative reliance on Pavlovian valuation has been found to increase when the perceived control over environmental reinforcers is compromised, leading to behavior resembling learned helplessness (LH). In our study, we used a version of an orthogonalized Go-NoGo reinforcement learning task to examine the relative reliance on Pavlovian and instrumental valuation during and after an intermittent loss of control over rewards and losses. Sixty healthy young...

Habits are a prominent feature of both adaptive and maladaptive behavior. Yet, despite substantial research efforts, there are currently no well-established experimental procedures for habit induction in humans. It is likely that laboratory experimental settings, as well as the session-based structure typically used in controlled experiments (also outside the lab), impose serious constraints on studying habits and other effects that are sensitive to context, motivation, and training duration and frequency. To overcome these challenges, we devised a unique real-world...

Performance during instrumental learning is commonly believed to reflect the knowledge that has been acquired up to that point. However, recent work in rodents found that instrumental performance was enhanced during periods when reinforcement was withheld, relative to periods when reinforcement was provided. This suggests that reinforcement may mask acquired knowledge and lead to impaired performance. In the present study, we investigated whether such a beneficial effect of removing reinforcement translates to humans. Specifically, we tested whether performance during...

Decisions between two economic goods can be swayed by a third unavailable ‘decoy’ alternative, which does not compete for choice, notoriously violating the principles of rational choice theory. Although decoy effects typically depend on the decoy’s position in a multiattribute choice space, recent studies using risky prospects (i.e., varying in reward and probability) reported a novel ‘positive’ decoy effect operating on a single value dimension: the higher the ‘expected value’ (EV) of an unavailable (distractor) prospect was, the easier the discrimination between two...

Human behaviour requires flexible arbitration between actions we do out of habit and actions that are directed towards a specific goal. Drugs that target opioid and dopamine receptors are notorious for inducing maladaptive habitual drug consumption; yet, how the opioidergic and dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems contribute to the arbitration between habitual and goal-directed behaviour is poorly understood. By combining pharmacological challenges with a well-established decision-making task and a novel computational model, we show that the administration of the...

Adolescents are known for their propensity to take risks, which may be especially strong in social contexts. People are known to use social information more when uncertain of how to decide. How feelings of uncertainty relate to the development of social susceptibility and risky choice across adolescence is unknown. To understand the effects of uncertainty on social influence, we introduce a novel task that measures risky choice under different levels of uncertainty, either with or without observing someone elses advice. Testing 161 adolescents and young adults (10-26...

Patch foraging presents a sequential decision-making problem widely studied across organisms — stay with a current option or leave it in search of a better alternative? Behavioral ecology has identified an optimal strategy for these decisions, but, across species, foragers systematically deviate from it, staying too long with an option or overharvesting relative to this optimum. Despite the ubiquity of this behavior, the mechanism underlying it remains unclear and an object of extensive investigation. Here, we address this gap by approaching foraging as both a...

A key question in decision-making is how humans arbitrate between competing learning and memory systems to maximize reward. We address this question by probing the balance between the effects, on choice, of incremental trial-and-error learning versus episodic memories of individual events. Although a rich literature has studied incremental learning in isolation, the role of episodic memory in decision-making has only recently drawn focus, and little research disentangles their separate contributions. We hypothesized that the brain arbitrates rationally between these two...

When judging the average value of sample stimuli (e.g., numbers) people tend to either over- or underweight extreme sample values, depending on task context. In a context of overweighting, recent work has shown that extreme sample values were overly represented also in neural signals, in terms of an anti-compressed geometry of number samples in multivariate electroencephalography (EEG) patterns. Here, we asked whether neural representational geometries may also reflect a relative underweighting of extreme values (i.e., compression) which has been observed behaviorally...

Base-rate neglect is a pervasive bias in judgment that is conceptualized as underweighting of prior information and can have serious consequences in real-world scenarios. This bias is thought to reflect variability in inferential processes but empirical support for a cohesive theory of base-rate neglect with sufficient explanatory power to account for longer-term and real-world beliefs is lacking. A Bayesian formalization of base-rate neglect in the context of sequential belief updating predicts that belief trajectories should exhibit dynamic patterns of dependence on...

The expanded version of the Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS-II) is a 99-item self-report measure containing 18 nonoverlapping dimensional scales assessing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and mania. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a German adaptation of the IDAS-II. Participants from a community sample (N = 1,054) completed the IDAS-II (German version). In addition, part of the sample (N = 550) completed a series of additional measures of depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-9, WHO-Five Well-Being Index, Symptom...