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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Experiential value neglect is robust to changes in learning architecture and nature of outcomes

Caroline Pioger¹, Basile Garcia, Stefano Palminteri¹; ¹Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL

Presenter: Caroline Pioger

In decision-making, values attached to options can stem from two sources: past experiences with rewards and punishments (experiential) or explicit descriptions of outcomes and probabilities (descriptive). According to the common currency hypothesis, we encode these subjective values on the same scale. Most studies examine decision-making within either experiential or descriptive options separately, but what about when individuals choose between the two? These hybrid choices reflect real-world decisions, such as choosing between a restaurant we’ve visited before (experiential) and one we know through online ratings (descriptive). Garcia et al. (2023) examined such hybrid choices by asking participants to choose between learned experiential options and symbolically described ones. Their findings revealed a systematic neglect of experiential options which persisted after controlling for alternative explanations such as insufficient learning and ambiguity aversion. This study explores whether experiential neglect arises from differences in how values are represented, or from memory retrieval cost. To investigate this, we ran three experiments, where we systematically manipulated the learning architectures and outcome information to reduce the representational difference between options. Our findings show that experiential neglect persisted across all conditions, further challenging the dominant theory and suggesting that the neglect is primarily driven by memory retrieval cost.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

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