Abstract
Event Abstract Back to Event You Don't Want To Know What You're Missing: When Information about Forgone Rewards Impedes Dynamic Decision Making A. R. Otto1* and Bradley C. Love1 1 University of Texas, United States In simple delay-of-gratification paradigms, diverting one’s attention from immediate rewards is an effective self-control strategy for refraining from short-term gains in order to maximize larger, long-term gains. These findings suggest that knowledge about foregone rewards (i.e., what could have been gained at each point by making a different choice) may impede long-term optimal decisions during intertemporal choice. We examined the effect of information about foregone rewards in a two-choice dynamic decision-making task in which short- and long-term gains were in conflict. In our task, participants made choices for real money. We found that providing veridical information about foregone rewards severely hindered participants’ ability to repeatedly make choices that maximize long-term rewards. In other words, we obtained a surprising pattern of results suggesting that the addition of relevant information in our task can lead to globally suboptimal choice patterns. We found that participants’ choice behavior is well characterized by a single Reinforcement-Learning (RL) mechanism that learns from both directly experienced and foregone rewards. This RL model predicts the deleterious effect of veridical information about foregone rewards. Further, individual differences in choice performance are elucidated by parameter fits, which lends support to the view that increased attention to foregone rewards accentuates the salience of immediate payoff differences between short- and long-term options. Conference: Computations, Decisions and Movement, Giessen, Germany, 19 May - 22 May, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Posters Citation: Otto AR and Love BC (2010). You Don't Want To Know What You're Missing: When Information about Forgone Rewards Impedes Dynamic Decision Making. Front. Comput. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Computations, Decisions and Movement. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.01.00013 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 01 Feb 2010; Published Online: 01 Feb 2010. * Correspondence: A. R Otto, University of Texas, Austin, United States, rotto@nyu.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers A. R Otto Bradley C Love Google A. R Otto Bradley C Love Google Scholar A. R Otto Bradley C Love PubMed A. R Otto Bradley C Love Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.
Highlights
When immediate temptations conflict with long-term aspirations, immediate temptations often prevail and important goals remain unfulfilled (Loewenstein, 1996; Rachlin, 1995)
To model the impact of indirectly experienced rewards in the True Foregone Rewards (True-FR) and False-FR conditions, we propose an extension to standard reinforcement learning (RL) by assuming that two learning episodes occur after an action is made: one update is made to the estimated reward associated with the chosen action, and a secondary update is made the estimated reward associated with the foregone action
As in a number of real-world situations, maximization of long-term rewards in our study required that the decisionmaker learn to forego larger immediate rewards guaranteed by one option and instead persist with a locally inferior option (Rachlin, 1995)
Summary
When immediate temptations conflict with long-term aspirations, immediate temptations often prevail and important goals remain unfulfilled (Loewenstein, 1996; Rachlin, 1995). Such failures of self-control are well documented in behavioral domains as diverse as dieting, smoking, and interpersonal conflict (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1996). We examine the impact of information about foregone (or fictive) outcomes on human decision-making behavior in situations in which shortand long-term rewards are in conflict. These forgone outcomes are counterfactual rewards that could have been obtained had one made alternate choices. Our task captures aspects of real-world tasks in which people face repeated choices with outcomes determined by past choices as well as current choices
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