Subliminal priming of winning images prompts increased betting in slot machine play

Biased confabulation in risky choice

When people make risky decisions based on past experience, they must rely on memory. The nature of the memory representations that support these decisions is not yet well understood. A key question concerns the extent to which people recall specific past episodes or whether they have learned a more abstract rule from their past experience. To address this question, we examined the precision of the memories used in risky decisions-from-experience. In three pre-registered experiments, we presented people with risky options, where the outcomes were drawn from continuous ranges (e.g., 100-190 or 500-590), and then assessed their memories for the outcomes experienced. In two preferential tasks, people were more risk seeking for high-value than low-value options, choosing as though they overweighted the outcomes from more extreme ranges. Moreover, in two preferential tasks and a parallel evaluation task, people were very poor at recalling the exact outcomes encountered, but rather confabulated outcomes that were consistent with the outcomes they had seen and were biased towards the more extreme ranges encountered. This common pattern suggests that the observed decision bias in the preferential task reflects a basic cognitive process to overweight extreme outcomes in memory. These results highlight the importance of the edges of the distribution in providing the encoding context for memory recall. They also suggest that episodic memory influences decision-making through gist memory and not through direct recall of specific instances.

Impact of Subliminally Presented Words Valence' on Risk-Taking Decisions in a Game of Chance

A positive mood is thought to accompany performing a risk-taking tendency, for instance in games of chance or gambling. This study concerns the impact of emotional stimuli presented in a subliminal manner on the riskiness of decisions made in a game of chance. The heights of stakes called in the game were adopted as the measure of risk taken. Special simulation of a real game of chance, based on coin tossing, was used for this experiment. The stimuli displayed subliminally were words differing in valence (three levels: negative, neutral, and positive). We expected that positive valence would provoke the riskiness of the subsequent decision. The main effect of the valence observed was that the subjects in positive word conditions bet higher stakes than in neutral and negative conditions. Positive emotions influenced the riskiness of decisions made by the subjects, which confirmed the set hypothesis. The results of the study, in addition to their theoretical implications, may have practical meaning due to realistic simulation of popular games of chance.

The role of memory in distinguishing risky decisions from experience and description

People's risk preferences differ for choices based on described probabilities versus those based on information learned through experience. For decisions from description, people are typically more risk averse for gains than for losses. In contrast, for decisions from experience, people are sometimes more risk seeking for gains than losses, especially for choices with the possibility of extreme outcomes (big wins or big losses), which are systematically overweighed in memory. Using a within-subject design, this study evaluated whether this memory bias plays a role in the differences in risky choice between description and experience. As in previous studies, people were more risk seeking for losses than for gains in description but showed the opposite pattern in experience. People also more readily remembered the extreme outcomes and judged them as having occurred more frequently. These memory biases correlated with risk preferences in decisions from experience but not in decisions from description. These results suggest that systematic memory biases may be responsible for some of the differences in risk preference across description and experience.