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The study examines how people infer the value of forgone options in the absence of direct feedback. We hypothesize that the value of unchosen options can be inferred in relation to their chosen counterpart, by reactivating a potential association between the two options formed during their mutual evaluation. To test this hypothesis, participants will be asked to decide between pairs of paintings. They will then learned only about the value of their selected paintings (either gain or no-gain). Finally they will be asked to make additional decisions, this time between two chosen paintings (gain and no-gain) or two unchosen paintings (presented with chosen gain and no-gain). In a Mechanical Turk pilot experiment (n=93), we found that participants preferred gain over no-gain paintings in chosen pairs (suggesting they were able to learn the value of their selected paintings). Interestingly, for unchosen pairs, for which they received no feedback, an opposite pattern was observed: participants preferred no-gain over gain paintings, exhibiting a diverging decision bias. The magnitude of this bias was correlated with recognition memory of the initial pairs. The current experiment aims to replicate these findings with a larger sample size.

In a recent paper we tested how people infer the value of unchosen options without being explicitly exposed to their outcomes (Biderman & Shohamy, 2021). We have shown that learning the value of the chosen option changed the value of the unchosen option, but in the opposite direction. We named this effect the “inverse decision bias”. Importantly, this inverse inference of value was correlated with the associative memory of the pairs people chose between. In this pre-registered study, we will take one step further and directly manipulate the strength of the memory association between options to reveal its role in the inverse decision bias.

Supplemental material, BidermanSupplementalMaterial for Working Memory Has Better Fidelity Than Long-Term Memory: The Fidelity Constraint Is Not a General Property of Memory After All by Natalie Biderman, Roy Luria, Andrei Teodorescu, Ron Hajaj and Yonatan Goshen-Gottstein in Psychological Science