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Value psychophysics: How salience-driven value integration explains decision biases and preference reversal

Konstantinos Tsetsos1*, Marius Usher2 and Nick Chater1, 3
  • 1 University College London, Department of Psychology, United Kingdom
  • 2 Tel-Aviv University, The Department of Psychology, Israel
  • 3 The University of Warwick, Warwick Business School, United Kingdom

Recent research on the psychology and neuroscience of simple, evidence-based choices (e.g., integrating perceptual or reward information) has led to an impressive progress in capturing the underlying mental processes as optimal mechanisms that make the fastest decision for a specified accuracy (1-5). The idea that decision-making is an optimal process stands in contrast with findings in more complex, motivation-based decisions, focused on multiple goals with trade-offs (e.g., choice among cars or flats). Here, a number of paradoxical and puzzling choice behaviors have been revealed (6-7), posing a serious challenge to the development of a unified theory of choice. Can a common theoretical framework between evidence-based and motivation-based decisions be established? A natural starting point is to propose that, in the latter, the cognitive system integrates subjective values (rather than, say, pieces of perceptual evidence), which depend on how each alternative matches the decision maker’s goals (8-9). A detailed understanding of these computations might explain the systematic anomalies observed in motivation-based decisions. This line of research has been difficult to pursue, however, because classical laboratory preference tasks provide little control of the moment-by-moment processes of value sampling and integration. To obtain more precise control on the decision input we introduce a novel experimental paradigm at the interface of psychophysics and motivation-based decisions. Participants simultaneously view two or three rapidly varying sequences of numerical values, described as stock market values or slot machines’ past payouts. At the end of the presentation, they choose the sequence with either the highest overall value or the sequence they would like to “play” for one further trial. Controlling the flow of the input values allowed us to directly probe how people attend to and integrate values. We demonstrate that this process underlies many puzzling choice paradoxes, such as temporal, risk and framing biases, as well as preference reversal. These phenomena are explained by a simple mechanism based on the integration of values, weighted by their salience. The salience of a sampled value depends on its temporal order and momentary rank in the decision context, while the direction of the weighting is determined by the task framing. We show that many choice anomalies arise from the microstructure of the value-integration process.

References

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Keywords: decision-making, Psychophysics, Risky choice

Conference: Neural Coding, Decision-Making & Integration in Time, Rauischholzhausen, Germany, 26 Apr - 29 Apr, 2012.

Presentation Type: Poster Presentation

Topic: Neural Coding, Decision-Making & Integration in Time

Citation: Tsetsos K, Usher M and Chater N (2012). Value psychophysics: How salience-driven value integration explains decision biases and preference reversal. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Neural Coding, Decision-Making & Integration in Time. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2012.86.00019

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Received: 12 Jan 2012; Published Online: 16 Jan 2012.

* Correspondence: Mr. Konstantinos Tsetsos, University College London, Department of Psychology, London, United Kingdom, konstantinos.tsetsos@psy.ox.ac.uk