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Poster A12 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Episodic memory is used to access features of past experience for flexible choice
Jonathan Nicholas1, Marcelo Mattar1; 1New York University
Our choices often require us to prioritize some features of our experiences over others. One way to solve this problem is by focusing on relevant information while discarding that which is irrelevant. Yet learning which features to prioritize requires extensive experience. Moreover, features that are irrelevant now may become relevant in the future. These issues can be addressed by instead sampling individual richly encoded experiences from episodic memory. Here we hypothesize that episodic memory is used to guide decisions based on multiple features of past events. We test this hypothesis using two experiments in which people made choices about the value of features that were present across multiple past experiences. We find evidence suggesting that participants used episodes to flexibly access features of past events during decision making. Overall, these results suggest that episodic memory promotes adaptive choice when knowledge of multiple features is necessary.
Keywords: decision making episodic memory reinforcement learning