Intertemporal choice reflects value comparison rather than self-control: insights from confidence judgements

Intertemporal decision-making has long been assumed to measure self-control, with prominent theories treating choices of smaller, sooner rewards as failed attempts to override immediate temptation. If this view is correct, people should be more confident in their intertemporal decisions when they 'successfully' delay gratification than when they do not. In two pre-registered experiments with built-in replication, adult participants (n = 117) made monetary intertemporal choices and rated their confidence in having made the right decisions. Contrary to assumptions of the self-control account, confidence was not higher when participants chose delayed rewards. Rather, participants were more confident in their decisions when possible rewards were further apart in time-discounted subjective value, closer to the present, and larger in magnitude. Demonstrating metacognitive insight, participants were more confident in decisions that better aligned with their separate valuation of possible rewards. Decisions made with less confidence were more prone to changes-of-mind and more susceptible to a patience-enhancing manipulation. Together, our results establish that confidence in intertemporal choice tracks uncertainty in estimating and comparing the value of possible rewards-just as it does in decisions unrelated to self-control. Our findings challenge self-control views and instead cast intertemporal choice as a form of value-based decision-making about future possibilities. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

Search for solutions, learning, simulation, and choice processes in suicidal behavior

Suicide may be viewed as an unfortunate outcome of failures in decision processes. Such failures occur when the demands of a crisis exceed a person's capacity to (i) search for options, (ii) learn and simulate possible futures, and (iii) make advantageous value‐based choices. Can individual‐level decision deficits and biases drive the progression of the suicidal crisis? Our overview of the evidence on this question is informed by clinical theory and grounded in reinforcement learning and behavioral economics. Cohort and case–control studies provide strong evidence that limited cognitive capacity and particularly impaired cognitive control are associated with suicidal behavior, imposing cognitive constraints on decision‐making. We conceptualize suicidal ideation as an element of impoverished consideration sets resulting from a search for solutions under cognitive constraints and mood‐congruent Pavlovian influences, a view supported by mostly indirect evidence. More compelling is the evidence of impaired learning in people with a history of suicidal behavior. We speculate that an inability to simulate alternative futures using one's model of the world may undermine alternative solutions in a suicidal crisis. The hypothesis supported by the strongest evidence is that the selection of suicide over alternatives is facilitated by a choice process undermined by randomness. Case–control studies using gambling tasks, armed bandits, and delay discounting support this claim. Future experimental studies will need to uncover real‐time dynamics of choice processes in suicidal people. In summary, the decision process framework sheds light on neurocognitive mechanisms that facilitate the progression of the suicidal crisis.

This article is categorized under:

Economics > Individual Decision‐Making

Psychology > Emotion and Motivation

Psychology > Learning

Neuroscience > Behavior

Mechanisms of competitive selection: A canonical neural circuit framework

Competitive selection, the transformation of multiple competing sensory inputs and internal states into a unitary choice, is a fundamental component of animal behavior. Selection behaviors have been studied under several intersecting umbrellas including decision-making, action selection, perceptual categorization, and attentional selection. Neural correlates of these behaviors and computational models have been investigated extensively. However, specific, identifiable neural circuit mechanisms underlying the implementation of selection remain elusive. Here, we employ a first principles approach to map competitive selection explicitly onto neural circuit elements. We decompose selection into six computational primitives, identify demands that their execution places on neural circuit design, and propose a canonical neural circuit framework. The resulting framework has several links to neural literature, indicating its biological feasibility, and has several common elements with prominent computational models, suggesting its generality. We propose that this framework can help catalyze experimental discovery of the neural circuit underpinnings of competitive selection.

Comparing two neurocognitive models of self-control during dietary decisions

Self-control is the process of favoring abstract, distal goals over concrete, proximal goals during decision-making and is an important factor in health and well-being. We directly compare two prominent neurocognitive models of human self-control with the goal of identifying which, if either, best describes behavioral and neural data of dietary decisions in a large sample of overweight and obese adults motivated to eat more healthfully. We extracted trial-by-trial estimates of neural activity during incentive-compatible choice from three brain regions implicated in self-control, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex and assessed evidence for the dual-process and value-based choice models of self-control using multilevel modeling. Model comparison tests revealed that the value-based choice model outperformed the dual-process model and best fit the observed data. These results advance scientific knowledge of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying self-control-relevant decision-making and are consistent with a value-based choice model of self-control.

Rapid Visuomotor Responses Reflect Value-Based Decisions

Cognitive decision-making is known to be sensitive to the values of potential options, which are the probability and size of rewards associated with different choices. Here, we examine whether rapid motor responses to perturbations of visual feedback about movement, which mediate low-level and involuntary feedback control loops, reflect computations associated with high-level value-based decision-making. In three experiments involving human participants, we varied the value associated with different potential targets for reaching movements by controlling the distributions of rewards across the targets (Experiment 1), the probability with which each target could be specified (Experiment 2), or both (Experiment 3). We found that the size of rapid and involuntary feedback responses to movement perturbations was strongly influenced by the relative value between targets. A statistical model of relative value that includes a term for risk sensitivity provided the best fit to the visuomotor response data, illustrating that feedback control policies are biased to favor more frequent task success at the expense of the overall extrinsic reward accumulated through movement. Importantly however, the regulation of rapid feedback responses was associated with successful pursuit of high-value task outcomes. This implies that when we move, the brain specifies a set of feedback control gains that enable low-level motor areas not only to generate efficient and accurate movement, but also to rapidly and adaptively respond to evolving sensory information in a manner consistent with value-based decision-making.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Current theories of sensorimotor control suggest that, rather than selecting and planning the details of movements in advance, the role of the brain is to set time-varying feedback gains that continuously transform sensory information into motor commands by feedback control. Here, we examine whether the fastest motor responses to perturbations of movement, which mediate low-level and involuntary feedback control loops (i.e., reflexes), reflect computations associated with high-level, value-based decision-making. We find that rapid feedback responses during reaching reflect the relative probabilities and rewards associated with target options. This suggests that low-order components of the sensorimotor control hierarchy, which generate rapid and automatic responses, can continuously evaluate evolving sensory evidence and initiate responses according to the prospect of reward.

Confidence modulates exploration and exploitation in value-based learning

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in cognitive processing. In this study, we aim to investigate the ability agents possess to track and report the noise inherent in their mental operations, often in the form of confidence judgments. Here, we argue that humans can use uncertainty inherent in their representations of value beliefs to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation. Such uncertainty is reflected in explicit confidence judgments. Using a novel variant of a multi-armed bandit paradigm, we studied how beliefs were formed and how uncertainty in the encoding of these value beliefs (belief confidence) evolved over time. We found that people used uncertainty to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation, reflected in a higher tendency toward exploration when their confidence in their value representations was low. We furthermore found that value uncertainty can be linked to frameworks of metacognition in decision making in two ways. First, belief confidence drives decision confidence, i.e. people's evaluation of their own choices. Second, individuals with higher metacognitive insight into their choices were also better at tracing the uncertainty in their environment. Together, these findings argue that such uncertainty representations play a key role in the context of cognitive control.

The influence of episodic memory decline on value-based choice

Recent studies suggest the involvement of episodic memory in value-based decisions as a source of information about subjective values of choice options. We therefore tested the link between age-related memory decline and inconsistencies in value-based decisions in 30 cognitively healthy older adults. Within the pre-registered experiment, the inconsistencies were measured in two ways: i) the consistency between stated preferences and revealed choices; ii) the amount of intransitivities in choice triplets, revealed in a forced paired choice task including all possible pairings of 20 food products. Although no significant association of memory functions to number of intransitive triplets was observed, participants with lower memory scores were more likely to choose the item for which they stated a lower preference. The results suggest a higher noise in the underlying preference signal in participants with lower memory. We discuss the results in the context of the unique needs of elderly consumers.

Value-based choice: An integrative, neuroscience-informed model of health goals

OBJECTIVE

Traditional models of health behaviour focus on the roles of cognitive, personality and social-cognitive constructs (e.g. executive function, grit, self-efficacy), and give less attention to the process by which these constructs interact in the moment that a health-relevant choice is made. Health psychology needs a process-focused account of how various factors are integrated to produce the decisions that determine health behaviour.

DESIGN

I present an integrative value-based choice model of health behaviour, which characterises the mechanism by which a variety of factors come together to determine behaviour. This model imports knowledge from research on behavioural economics and neuroscience about how choices are made to the study of health behaviour, and uses that knowledge to generate novel predictions about how to change health behaviour. I describe anomalies in value-based choice that can be exploited for health promotion, and review neuroimaging evidence about the involvement of midline dopamine structures in tracking and integrating value-related information during choice. I highlight how this knowledge can bring insights to health psychology using illustrative case of healthy eating.

CONCLUSION

Value-based choice is a viable model for health behaviour and opens new avenues for mechanism-focused intervention.

Can Neuroscience Assist Us in Constructing Better Patterns of Economic Decision-Making?

We draw on outstanding research (Sanfey et al., 2006; McCabe, 2008; Bernheim, 2009; Camerer, 2013; Radu and McClure, 2013; Declerck and Boone, 2016) to substantiate that neuroeconomics covers the investigation of the biological microfoundations of economic cognition and economic conduct, attempts to prove that a superior grasp of how choices are made brings about superior expectations regarding which options are selected, preserves the strictness of economic analysis in defining value-based decision, and associates imaging techniques with economic pattern to explain how individuals decide on a strategy taking into account various possible choices. Neuroeconomics is adequately prepared to regulate the notion of how choices are determined by mental states. The position that will be elaborated in this article is that neuroeconomic patterns are enabled and enhanced in descriptive capacity by psychological outcomes and substantiated in biological processes. Advancement in neuroeconomics takes place when outcomes from distinct procedures are coherent with an ordinary mechanistic clarification of what generates choice, construed by a computational pattern. We will develop this point further by proving that economics improves the concerted effort of neuroeconomics by using its observations in the various results that may stem from the planned and market interplays of diverse participants, and via a series of accurate, explicit, mathematical patterns to construe such interplays and results. Neuroeconomics experiments employ a mixture of brain imaging/stimulation tests advanced in the cognitive neurosciences and microeconomic systems/game theory tests advanced in the economic sciences. Our analyses indicate that neuroeconomics aims to employ the supplementary input gained from brain investigations, associated with the decision maker's selection, with the purpose of better grasping the cogitation process and to utilize the outcomes to enhance economic patterns.