The value of choice facilitates subsequent memory across development

Abstract

Both children and adults are more likely to remember information when they have control over their learning environment. Despite many demonstrations of this effect in the literature, it is still unclear how and why people are more likely to remember information that is obtained through their own actions rather than passively received. One possibility is that individuals are biased to remember the outcomes of their choices because doing so may often be beneficial. Having agency, or the ability to exert control, is valuable when individuals can act in an instrumental manner to achieve their goals. Preferentially encoding information encountered in such contexts may confer an advantage when making similar decisions in the future. However, it has not been directly examined whether modulating the value, or utility, of agency affects its mnemonic benefit. Additionally, the developmental trajectory of how the utility of agency affects memory is unclear. The current study examines whether the mnemonic benefit of agency is modulated by the utility of choice and whether this effect varies as a function of age. We tested 96 participants, ages 8 to 25, in a paradigm in which agency and its utility were separately manipulated at encoding. In contrast to previous studies, we did not find that simply having the ability to make a choice enhanced memory. Rather, when the utility of agency varied within the task, we only observed an agency-related memory benefit when the ability to choose had the greatest utility. This pattern was age-invariant, suggesting that this effect on memory is present in middle childhood and persists through adulthood.

Reward prediction errors drive declarative learning irrespective of agency

“…Traditional empirical work in procedural learning has focused on actions only; the absence of a significant interaction between agency and RPE in the current study indicates that participants use RPEs to learn about both states and their own actions while performing a declarative learning task (see also Rouhani et al, 2018;Rouhani et al, 2020). Surprisingly, in contrast to the current and earlier studies where a mere effect of agency was found (DuBrow et al, 2019;Murty et al, 2015;Rotem-Turchinski et al, 2019), Katzman and Hartley (2020) argued that agency itself is not sufficient to enhance memory. In their experiment, participants performed a memory task where the utility of agency (i.e., the degree to which participants' choices were rewarded Fig.…”

“…Moreover, even being able to choose the order and the timing of item presentation, has been associated with increased memorization in both adult (Markant et al, 2016) and child (Ruggeri et al, 2019) learners. Overall, evidence suggests that being in control of one's own learning experience by having the opportunity to choose is critical for successful declarative learning (but see Katzman & Hartley, 2020, and the Discussion section).…”

Developmental change in prefrontal cortex recruitment supports the emergence of value-guided memory

“…In one such study, adolescents demonstrated greater reward-based modulation of hippocampal-striatal connectivity than adults, and the strength of this connectivity predicted reward-related memory ( Davidow et al, 2016 ). However, other studies have not found evidence for developmental change in the influence of valenced outcomes on memory ( Cohen et al, 2019a ; Katzman and Hartley, 2020 ). The influence of different motivational and reward signals on memory across development may not be straightforward — individual and developmental differences in neurocognitive processes including sensitivity to valenced feedback ( Ngo et al, 2019 ; Rosenbaum et al, 2020 ), curiosity ( Fandakova and Gruber, 2021 ), and emotional processing ( Adelman and Estes, 2013 ; Eich and Castel, 2016 ) may interact, leading to complex relations between age, motivation, and memory performance.…”

Developmental shifts in computations used to detect environmental controllability

“…This rewarding nature of controllable experience creates an intrinsic motivation to discover controllable events, which has been proposed to be a key driver of development (Heckhausen, 2011) and can serve as an effective objective function enabling artificial agents to develop complex action repertoires (Klyubin et al, 2005;Salge et al, 2014). Like explicit rewards, control facilitates learning and memory (Chambon et al, 2020;Cockburn et al, 2014), even from a young age (Katzman & Hartley, 2020;Ruggeri et al, 2019). Collectively, these findings suggest that inferences of environmental controllability play a key role in the development of an individual's behavioral repertoire and their acquisition of foundational knowledge about the structure of one's environment.…”