Coherency-maximizing exploration in the supermarket

Riefer, Peter S.; Prior, Rosie; Blair, Nicholas F.; Pavey, Giles; Love, Bradley C.

doi:10.1038/s41562-016-0017

Cited by 34 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Reaction times are also facilitated for response repetitions in serial choice reaction tasks (e.g., Bertelson, 1965;Rabbitt and Vyas, 1974). In everyday life, past actions predicts future actions (e.g., product choices in the supermarket; Riefer et al, 2017), even after controlling for other predictors such as conscious intentions and beliefs about social norms (Ouellette and Wood, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the goal is to maximize reward, an agent's actions should be entirely predictable from its reward history; in other words, the law of exercise should be completely dominated by the law of effect. If anything, the need to explore actions in order to gain information about their consequences should induce a tendency against repeating past actions (Riefer et al, 2017;Schulz and Gershman, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Origin of perseveration in the trade-off between reward and complexity

Gershman

2020

Preprint

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When humans and other animals make repeated choices, they tend to repeat previously chosen actions independently of their reward history. This paper locates the origin of perseveration in a trade-off between two computational goals: maximizing rewards and minimizing the complexity of the action policy. We develop an information-theoretic formalization of policy complexity and show how optimizing the trade-off leads to perseveration. Analysis of two data sets reveals that people attain close to optimal trade-offs. Parameter estimation and model comparison supports the claim that perseveration quantitatively agrees with the theoretically predicted functional form.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Origin of perseveration in the trade-off between reward and complexity

Gershman

2020

Preprint

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“…The idea that past decisions bias preferences was put forth decades ago (Ariely & Norton, 2008;Brehm, 1956) and compelling evidence for post-decision revaluation has accumulated since (Ariely & Norton, 2008;Izuma et al, 2010;Riefer et al, 2017;Sharot et al, 2010) (but see Chen & Risen, 2010 for critical discussion). Here, we present behavioral evidence from four independent data sets that reward-predictive CS that were chosen in the past are more likely to be selected during future choice contexts, compared to CS of equal value that were not presented during choice-induced revaluation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Third, we provide a mechanism underlying seemingly irrational choice behavior: Even though participants chose between equivalent options, choice-induced revaluation biased them towards preferring chosen, and towards neglecting non-selected options. The latter might have important implications for explaining subjective preferences, especially in consumer choice behavior (Riefer et al, 2017) and in understanding why humans tend to make coherent decisions, even in conditions characterized by maladaptive choice behavior such as substance dependence or obsessive compulsive disorder.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this unidirectional view has been challenged by cognitive accounts of decision making, suggesting that memory representations of option values might themselves be subject to changes induced by an agent's choices. This suggests a bidirectional relationship between value representations in memory and decision making (Ariely & Norton, 2008;Riefer, Prior, Blair, Pavey, & Love, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Decisions bias future choices by modifying hippocampal associative memories

Luettgau

Tempelmann

Kaiser

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Decision making is guided by memories of option values. However, retrieving items from memory renders them malleable. Here, we show that merely retrieving values from memory and making a choice between options is sufficient both to induce changes to stimulus-reward associations in the hippocampus and to bias future decision making. After allowing participants to make repeated choices between reward-conditioned stimuli, in the absence of any outcome, we observed that participants preferred stimuli they had previously chosen, and neglected previously unchosen stimuli, over otherwise identical-valued options. Using functional brain imaging, we show that decisions induced changes to hippocampal representations of stimulusoutcome associations. These changes were correlated with future decision biases. Our results indicate that choice-induced preference changes are partially driven by choice-induced modification of memory representations and suggest that merely making a choice -even without experiencing any outcomes -induces associative plasticity. Results Behavioral ExperimentsFirst, we detailed the behavioral choice-induced revaluation effect in three independent experiments. In each experiment, participants learnt associations between neutrally rated CS and three food items (Blechert, Meule, Busch, & Ohla, 2014) serving as unconditioned stimuli (US, Fig. 1A). For each participant, the US were individually chosen based on a prior rating of subjective preference on a visual analog scale ranging from low to high preference. This rating procedure resulted in selection of a low-value (US -), an intermediate-value (US 0 ) and a highvalue (US + ) food item. Next, participants rated kanji stimuli according to their subjective preference. Six of these kanjis rated in close proximity to "neutral" (center point of the visual analog scale) were selected as CS for Pavlovian learning. Two CS each were paired with one US, resulting in three categories of differently valued CS: CS + A/B, CS 0 A/B and CS -A/B, for high-, intermediate-and low-value CS.The Pavlovian learning phase was followed by a choice-induced revaluation. From two value categories, one CS each was selected, and participants made binary choices between them, interspersed with lure decisions between non-reward-predictive kanjis (Fig. 1B).Crucially, no associated US were presented following choices, excluding the possibility of alterations in strength of stimulus-outcome associations due to directly experienced outcomes.The choice-induced revaluation phase was followed by a decision probe phase in which participants chose repeatedly between all binary CS combinations to assess preferences (Fig. 1C). The key comparison was between CS presented during revaluation versus CS from the same value category that had not been presented. Again, no outcomes were presented. Decisions are biased by past choicesThere was evidence for value transfer from US to CS across all studies ( Fig. 1E-H), as indicated by significant main effects of CS value on probe phase choice probabilit...

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Conceptual Organization is Revealed by Consumer Activity Patterns

Hornsby

Evans²,

Riefer³

et al. 2019

Comput Brain Behav

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Meaning may arise from an element's role or interactions within a larger system. For example, hitting nails is more central to people's concept of a hammer than its particular material composition or other intrinsic features. Likewise, the importance of a web page may result from its links with other pages rather than solely from its content. One example of meaning arising from extrinsic relationships are approaches that extract the meaning of word concepts from co-occurrence patterns in large, text corpora. The success of these methods suggest that human activity patterns may reveal conceptual organization. However, texts do not directly reflect human activity, but instead serve a communicative function and are usually highly curated or edited to suit an audience. Here, we apply methods devised for text to a data source that directly reflects thousands of individuals' activity patterns, namely supermarket purchases. Using product co-occurrence data from nearly 1.3m shopping baskets, we trained a topic model to learn 25 high-level concepts (or topics). These topics were found to be comprehensible and coherent by both retail experts and consumers. Topics ranged from specific (e.g., ingredients for a stir-fry) to general (e.g., cooking from scratch). Topics tended to be goal-directed and situational, consistent with the notion that human conceptual knowledge is tailored to support action. Individual differences in the topics sampled predicted basic demographic characteristics. These results suggest that human activity patterns reveal conceptual organization and may give rise to it. cognition | computational social science | big data | machine learning | decision making

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Coherency-maximizing exploration in the supermarket

Cited by 34 publications

References 27 publications

Origin of perseveration in the trade-off between reward and complexity

Origin of perseveration in the trade-off between reward and complexity

Decisions bias future choices by modifying hippocampal associative memories

Conceptual Organization is Revealed by Consumer Activity Patterns

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