Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Center

How Does the Choice Strategy Depend on the Context?

The Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Center has published the 13th issue of the scientific digest. According to the research, in reinforcement learning, coding of choice results occurs in a context-dependent manner.

How Does the Choice Strategy Depend on the Context?

A wealth of evidence in perceptual and economic decision-making research suggests that the value of one option is determined by other available options (i.e. the context). A series of studies provides evidence that the same coding principles apply to situations where decisions are shaped by past outcomes, i.e. in reinforcement-learning situations. As a consequence, human behavior is driven not by objective, but subjective values of options represented in context-dependent manner. While such outcome context-dependence may be informationally or ecologically optimal, it concomitantly undermines the capacity of generalizing value-based knowledge to new contexts – sometimes creating apparent decision paradoxes.

The experts concluded that in human reinforcement learning, outcomes are encoded in a context-dependent manner. In addition, context-dependence transforms objective outcomes into subjective ones and includes reference point rescaling and range adaptation. These processes have both desirable and undesirable behavioral consequences.

Scientific Digest Project managed by Olga Voron.

Digest 13 is available at the link.