Dynamic memory (re-)activation in human decision making

• Applicant: Dr. Bernhard Spitzer
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 444526808

When making decisions, our individual and situational preferences are strongly influenced by past experience and learning. Neurocognitive accounts of value-based choice have traditionally focused on procedural and semantic memory functions, in complement to formal descriptions of subjective value- and probability weighting functions in behavioral economics. More recently, it has increasingly been hypothesized that decisions may be crucially shaped also by retrieval and (re-)activation of concrete memories, for instance, in terms of sampling from episodic memory. To date, the contribution of concrete memory reactivation to decision-making, despite its theoretical and intuitive appeal, has not been studied directly in human neural signals. Here, we seek to fill this gap using a newly developed analytical framework to disclose dynamic memory (re-)activations in human electroencephalographic patterns during decisional deliberation. In a series of experiments, we test for reactivation of previously encountered value items during decisional evaluation in (i) simple value judgments, (ii) transitive inference, and (iii) context-dependent value learning. In further studies, we adopt the same analysis framework to test the extent to which endogenous (re-)activation of previously experienced outcomes governs (iv) subjective preferences in risky choice and (v) active risk-taking in a dynamic “real-world” scenario. Fusing multivariate neural pattern analyses with computational modelling of behavior, and capitalizing on the millisecond resolution of human electroencephalography, we seek to gain insights into the temporal dynamics of memory sampling, and its behavioral relevance in human decisional deliberation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants