Evidence accumulates for individual attributes during value-based decisions.

Abstract

When choosing between different options, we tend to consider specific attribute qualities rather than deliberating over some general sense of the options' overall values (OVs). The importance of each attribute together with its quality will determine our preference rankings over the available alternatives. Here, we test the hypothesis that the most prominent class of model for simple decisions-sequential sampling or evidence accumulation to bound-can be bolstered by explicitly incorporating variables related to individual attributes in addition to the standard usage of OV estimates. We examine six data sets in which participants evaluated snack foods both in terms of OV and individual attributes, then choose between pairs of the same snacks and show that only models that explicitly incorporate information about the individual attributes are able to reproduce fundamental patterns in the choice data, such as the influence of attribute disparity on decisions, and such models provide quantitatively better fits to the choice outcomes, response times, and confidence ratings compared to models based on OV alone. Our results provide important evidence that incorporating attribute-level information into computational models help us to better understand the cognitive processes involved in value-based decision-making.

The human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas during creative thinking

“…Indeed, the neural representation of attributes may be contingent upon their nature, and in some cases, attributes may not be represented at all in the brain. For instance, in the context of food choices, regions such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) are associated with the healthy attributes of food, while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is linked to the tasty attributes (Hare et al, 2011;Lee & Hare, 2023). Similarly, in the realm of social decision-making, brain regions like the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) or the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC, part of the DMN) are implicated in processing social attributes, while the ventral striatum plays a role in self-related attributes (Matsuura et al, 2021;Ratcliff & McKoon, 2008;Suzuki et al, 2017;M.…”