Proactive and reactive construction of memory-based preferences.

ABSTRACT: We are often faced with decisions we have never encountered before, requiring us to infer possible outcomes before making a choice. Computational theories suggest that one way to make these types of decisions is by accessing and linking related experiences stored in memory. Past work has shown that such memory-based preference construction can occur at a number of different timepoints relative to the moment a decision is made. Some studies have found that memories are integrated at the time a decision is faced (reactively) while others found that memory integration happens earlier, when memories were initially encoded (proactively). Here we offer a resolution to this inconsistency, demonstrating that these two strategies tradeoff rationally as a function of the associative structure of mem

SUBMITTER: Nicholas J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11825774 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature