The Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Experience-Based Decisions

Book excerpt: In experience-based decisions people learn to make decisions by sampling the relevant alternatives and getting feedback. The study of experience-based decisions has recently revealed some robust regularities that differ from how people make decisions based on descriptions. For example, people were found to underweight small probability events in experience-based decisions, while overweighting them in decisions based on descriptions (i.e. where the participants have full information about the outcome distributions but no feedback). This is now commonly referred to as the description-experience gap. In parallel to the recent advancement in Decision Science, neuroscientists have for a long while used the experience-based decisions paradigm for analyzing brain-behavior interactions. For example, phenomena such as the feedback-based Error-Related Negativity (fERN) in event-related potentials and the role of non-declarative knowledge in selecting advantageously were discovered using experience-based tasks. The goal of the current Research Topic is to combine two sources of knowledge concerning experience-based decisions: State of the art models in decision science, and neuroscientific and psychophysiological approaches that shed light on the working of the brain in these decisions. Also relevant are process-based analyses of fractions of behavior in these types of decisions. We consider original empirical work and theoretical analyses of existing datasets.