Rationalizing Context-Dependent Preferences: Divisive Normalization and Neurobiological Constraints on Choice

Webb, Ryan; Glimcher, Paul W.; Louie, Kenway

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2462895

Cited by 27 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 169 publications

(103 reference statements)

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“…This might suggest that IIA violations are a result of neural constraints carved by evolution in order to maximize information under limited time and resources. This hypothesis is in line with previous studies showing that IIA violations can be explained by a divisive normalization framework (K. Louie, Grattan, & Glimcher, 2011;Webb et al, 2014), which is a general and robust rule of cortical computation (Heeger, 2016).…”

Section: Cc-by-nc-nd 40 International License Not Peer-reviewed) Is supporting

confidence: 92%

“…However, recent electrophysiological (Kenway Louie & Glimcher, 2012;Schultz, 2004;Webb, Glimcher, & Louie, 2014) and neuroimaging data (Bartra, McGuire, & Kable, 2013;Levy & Glimcher, 2012;Rangel & Hare, 2010) show that a number of brain areas represent subjective value information. Such findings suggest that rationality-based models are approximated, at the level of information coding, in biological decision circuits.…”

Section: Cc-by-nc-nd 40 International License Not Peer-reviewed) Is mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bounded Rationality in C. elegans

Cohen

Volovich

Zeevi

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Rational choice theory in economics assumes optimality indecision-making.One of the basic axioms of economic rationality is "Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives" (IIA), according to which a preference ratio between two options should be unaffected by introducing additional alternatives to the choice set.Violations of IIA have been demonstrated in both humans and in various animals, and could therefore stem from common neuronal constraints. We . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under aThe copyright holder for this preprint (which was . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/257535 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2018; used the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, an animal with only 302 neurons and a fully mapped connectome, to examine when and why economic rationality and violations of rationality occur. We developed tests for IIA violations by characterizing the choices that C. elegans make in olfactory chemotaxis assays. In each assay, we exposed the worm to different odors that activate only specific neurons, thus involving in the choice process only defined neuronal networks, and tested whether particular neuronal architectures are prone to producing irrational choices. We found that C. elegans are capable of maintaining robust binary olfactory preferences irrespectively of the presence of a third attractive odor. However, in very specific olfactory contexts, which we term asymmetric overlaps, the preference ratio between the two odors was altered due to the addition of a third inferior odor, in a manner that violates IIA, and in certain cases can be considered "irrational" based on the economic definition of rationality. Our results suggest that different network configurations vary in their propensity to give rise to inconsistent decision making. Thus, non-optimal choices, assumed to be an outcome of high-order cognitive and mental processes, could result from much more basic attributes of neuronal activity and constrained computational mechanisms.

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Section: Cc-by-nc-nd 40 International License Not Peer-reviewed) Is supporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Cc-by-nc-nd 40 International License Not Peer-reviewed) Is mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bounded Rationality in C. elegans

Cohen

Volovich

Zeevi

et al. 2018

Preprint

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“…This would be consistent with an emerging body of evidence that numerical value, rather than 158 conversion rate or units matter to human subjects [17,26]. A second possible interpretation is that subjects 159 normalize the subjective delay of the offers based on context, just as they normalize subjective value based on 160 current context and recent history [39,41,76,78]. A third possibility is that in the short delay tasks (NV and 161 SV) subjects experience the wait for the reward on each trial as quite costly, in comparison to the delayed 162 gratification experienced in the LV task.…”

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confidence: 62%

“…S1). Since we did not ex ante have a strong hypothesis about 77 how the subjects' impulsivity measures in one task would translate across tasks, we first examined ranks of 78 impulsivity and found significant correlations across experimental tasks (Table 1). In other words, the most 79 impulsive subject in one task is likely to be the most impulsive subject in another task.…”

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confidence: 99%

Time preferences are reliable across time-horizons and verbal vs. experiential tasks

Lukinova

Wang

Lehrer

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Individual differences in delay-discounting correlate with important real world outcomes, e.g. education, income, drug use, & criminality. As such, delay-discounting has been extensively studied by economists, psychologists and neuroscientists to reveal its behavioral and biological mechanisms in both human and non-human animal models. However, two major methodological differences hinder comparing results across species. Human studies present long time-horizon options verbally, whereas animal studies employ experiential cues and short delays. To bridge these divides, we developed a novel language-free experiential task inspired by animal decision-making studies. We find that subjects' time-preferences are reliable across both verbal/experiential differences and also second/day differences. When we examined whether discount factors shifted or scaled across the tasks, we found a surprisingly strong effect of temporal context. Taken together, this indicates that subjects have a stable, but context-dependent, time-preference that can be reliably assessed using different methods; thereby, providing a foundation to bridge studies of time-preferences across species. Introduction 1Intertemporal choices involve a trade-off between a larger outcome received later and a smaller outcome 2 received sooner. Many individual decisions have this temporal structure, such as whether to purchase a 3 cheaper refrigerator, but forgo the ongoing energy savings. Since research has found that intertemporal 4 preferences are predictive of a wide variety of important life outcomes, ranging from SAT scores, graduating 5 from college, and income to anti-social behaviors, e.g. gambling or drug abuse [1,13,24,28,45], they are 6 frequently studied in both humans and animals across multiple disciplines, including marketing, economics, 7 psychology, and neuroscience. 8A potential obstacle to understanding the biological basis of intertemporal decision-making is that human 9 studies differ from non-human animal studies in two important ways: long versus short time-horizons and 10 choices that are made based on verbal versus non-verbal (i.e. "experiential") stimuli. In animal studies, the 11 subjects experience the delay between their choice and the reward (sometimes cued with a ramping sound or a 12 diminishing visual stimulus) before they can proceed to the next trial [8,11,73]. Generally, there is nothing for 13 the subject to do during this waiting period. In human studies, subjects usually make a series of choices 14 (either via computer or a survey) between smaller sooner offers and larger offers delayed by months or 15 years [2, 49]. (We are aware of only a handful of studies that have used delays of minutes [48] or 16 seconds [25, 31, 40, 60, 72]). During the delay (e.g. if the payout is in 6 months) the human subjects go about 17 1/25 their lives, likely forgetting about the delayed payment, just as individuals do not actively think about their 18 retirement savings account each moment until their retirement. 19Animal studies of delay-disc...

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“…To see whether choice behavior degrades in exactly this way, Ryan Webb, LoFaro, Louie, and I (Louie et al 2013;Webb et al 2014) developed a series of human and animal choice experiments in which we searched for anomalies like the one described above. Perhaps surprisingly, we found that each of the predictions our models made accurately described an anomalous choice behavior found in humans and in monkeys that defied traditional economic analysis.…”

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Understanding the Hows and Whys of Decision-Making: From Expected Utility to Divisive Normalization

Glimcher

2014

Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol

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Over the course of the last century, economists and ethologists have built detailed models from first principles of how humans and animals should make decisions. Over the course of the last few decades, psychologists and behavioral economists have gathered a wealth of data at variance with the predictions of these economic models. This has led to the development of highly descriptive models that can often predict what choices people or animals will make but without offering any insight into why people make the choices that they do-especially when those choices reduce a decision-maker's well-being. Over the course of the last two decades, neurobiologists working with economists and psychologists have begun to use our growing understanding of how the nervous system works to develop new models of how the nervous system makes decisions. The result, a growing revolution at the interdisciplinary border of neuroscience, psychology, and economics, is a new field called Neuroeconomics. Emerging neuroeconomic models stand to revolutionize our understanding of human and animal choice behavior by combining fundamental properties of neurobiological representation with decision-theoretic analyses. In this overview, one class of these models, based on the widely observed neural computation known as divisive normalization, is presented in detail. The work demonstrates not only that a discrete class of computation widely observed in the nervous system is fundamentally ubiquitous, but how that computation shapes behaviors ranging from visual perception to financial decision-making. It also offers the hope of reconciling economic analysis of what choices we should make with psychological observations of the choices we actually do make.The postenlightenment study of human decisionmaking has its roots in the work of mathematicians and economists like Blaise Pascal, Daniel Bernoulli, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo. These scholars sought to explain regularities in human behavior from first principles. For these early theorists, that meant defining algorithms that maximized individual gain, profit, or well-being and that thus gave rise to observable market level regularities. These scholars took as their focus the study of "why"-why it was that people made the choices they did from a mathematical and theoretical point of view. While revising many of the key assumptions of these early scholars, economists of the early 1900s like Paul Samuelson (Samuelson 1947) and John von Neumann (Neumann and Morgenstern 1944) made huge strides in this direction by defining how decision-making ought to work in humans. They developed theories that fundamentally described how "optimal" decision-makers should behave.In the 1960s, however, it started to become clear that humans did not always behave in exactly the ways predicted by these theories. Work by economists like Maurice Allais (Allais 1953) and psychologists like Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) began to reveal systematic patterns of behavior that violated the prediction...

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Rationalizing Context-Dependent Preferences: Divisive Normalization and Neurobiological Constraints on Choice

Cited by 27 publications

References 169 publications

Bounded Rationality in C. elegans

Bounded Rationality in C. elegans

Time preferences are reliable across time-horizons and verbal vs. experiential tasks

Understanding the Hows and Whys of Decision-Making: From Expected Utility to Divisive Normalization

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