Abstract
When choosing between options, whether menu items or career paths, we can evaluate how rewarding each one will be, or how congruent it is with our current choice goal (e.g., to point out the best option or the worst one.). Past decision-making research interpreted findings through the former lens, but in these experiments the most rewarding option was always most congruent with the task goal (choosing the best option). It is therefore unclear to what extent expected reward vs. goal congruency can account for choice value findings. To deconfound these two variables, we performed three behavioral studies and an fMRI study in which the task goal varied between identifying the best vs. the worst option. Contrary to prevailing accounts, we find that goal congruency dominates choice behavior and neural activity. We separately identify dissociable signals of expected reward. Our findings call for a reinterpretation of previous research on value-based choice.
Highlights
When choosing between options, whether menu items or career paths, we can evaluate how rewarding each one will be, or how congruent it is with our current choice goal
Choice sets were tailored to each participant, based on how rewarding they had rated each item individually earlier in the session, and these sets varied in their overall reward value and in the similarity of option values to one another (Supplementary Fig. 4)
Previous studies have consistently shown that participants are faster to select their most preferred item out of a set as the overall reward value of their options increases[11,12,13,14]
Summary
Whether menu items or career paths, we can evaluate how rewarding each one will be, or how congruent it is with our current choice goal (e.g., to point out the best option or the worst one.). It is unclear to what extent expected reward vs goal congruency can account for choice value findings To deconfound these two variables, we performed three behavioral studies and an fMRI study in which the task goal varied between identifying the best vs the worst option. People make faster decisions when the option they choose is much more rewarding than the option(s) they forego[9,10], and when the overall (i.e., average) reward associated with those choice options is high[11,12,13,14] These behavioral findings are paralleled by increasing relative and overall value related activity in regions of a well-characterized value network[15,16], that includes regions of ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
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