What I like is what I remember: Memory modulation and preferential choice.

Abstract

Sloan Foundation, and Wharton Risk Management Center's Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship. We thank Drs. Michael Kahana, Eric Bradlow, Christophe Van den Bulte, and members of the Computational Behavioral Sciences Lab for helpful discussion.

Retrieval-constrained valuation: Toward prediction of open-ended decisions

“…By contrast, additional parameters in variants of the RCV model that aim to capture the maximal size of the internal menu or the effect of recall order do not generalize well from one category to another and should be seen as a descriptive component of these extended models. Future studies are necessary to investigate the determinants of these variables of interest-for example, how the size and the composition of the internal menu may be affected by internal (e.g., working memory capacity, category knowledge, and preference structure) and contextual (e.g., environmental memory cues) factors (51)(52)(53)(54), as well as their effects on subsequent choices.…”

The common effect of value on prioritized memory and category representation

“…However, even when people believe that they will not be able to use the information in this way, the effect remains at a diminished level. In other words, people exhibit prioritized retrieval of high-value targets even when not task-relevant, and show still greater prioritization of high-value targets when justified by the task [9].…”

“…A large and growing body of research suggests that people are especially likely to remember things that are of high value [8][9][10][11]23]. Presumably this is because, all else being equal, the valuable things are the ones we profit most from being able to remember and reason about-i.e., because this makes rational use of a limited cognitive resource [24,25].…”

“…Second, even if people learn that an object is good only after the time that they observe it, comparable effects still arise, with people devoting more cognitive capacity to memory consolidation for objects they regard as good [8]. Finally, there is evidence for an effect of value on memory retrieval [9,25]. This effect is particularly strong in domains where valuable targets are more important to retrieve-e.g., when one retrieves memories of objects in order to use them, and higher-value objects have highvalue uses.…”

“…Here, too, it has long been recognized that we remember things better the more frequently we encounter them [6,7], but recent research indicates that value judgments play an important role in prioritized memory as well [8][9][10][11]. Specifically, people tend to selectively learn and remember information about the features of objects they regard as good, while devoting less cognitive capacity to less good objects.…”