Frömer, R., & Shenhav, A. (2021, May 17).
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dnvrj
Abstract
While often seeming to investigate rather different problems, research into value-based decision making and cognitive control have historically offered parallel insights into how people select thoughts and actions. While the former studies how people weigh costs and benefits to make a decision, the latter studies how they adjust information processing to achieve their goals. Recent work has highlighted ways in which decision-making research can inform our understanding of cognitive control. Here, we provide the complementary perspective: how cognitive control research has informed understanding of decision-making. We highlight three particular areas of research where this critical interchange has occurred: (1) how different types of goals shape the evaluation of choice options, (2) how people use control to adjust how they make their decisions, and (3) how people monitor decisions to inform adjustments to control at multiple levels and timescales. We show how adopting this alternate viewpoint offers new insight into the determinants of both decisions and control; provides alternative interpretations for common neuroeconomic findings; and generates fruitful directions for future research.
Highlights
• We review how taking a cognitive control perspective provides novel insights into the mechanisms of value based choice.
• We highlight three areas of research where this critical interchange has occurred:
(1) how different types of goals shape the evaluation of choice options,
(2) how people use control to adjust how they make their decisions, and
(3) how people monitor decisions to inform adjustments to control at multiple levels and timescales.
From Exerting Control Beyond Our Current Choice
We have so far discussed choices the way they are typically studied:in isolation. However, we don’t make choices in a vacuum, and our current choices depend on previous choices we have made (Erev & Roth, 2014; Keung, Hagen, & Wilson, 2019; Talluri et al., 2020; 618Urai, Braun, & Donner, 2017; Urai, de Gee, Tsetsos, & Donner, 2019). One natural way in which choices influence each other is through learning about the options, where the evaluations of the outcome of one choice refines the expected value (incorporating range and probability) assigned to that option in future choices (Fontanesi, Gluth, et al., 2019; Fontanesi, Palminteri, et al., 2019; Miletic et al., 2021). Here we focus on a different, complementary way, central to cognitive control research, where evaluations of the process of ongoing and past choices inform the process of future choices(Botvinick et al., 1999; Bugg, Jacoby, & Chanani, 2011; Verguts, Vassena, & Silvetti, 2015). In cognitive control research, these choice evaluations and their influence on subsequent adaptation are studied under the umbrella of performance monitoring (Carter et al., 1998; Ullsperger, Fischer, Nigbur, & Endrass, 2014). Unlike option-based learning, performance monitoring influences not only which options are chosen, but also how subsequent choices are made. It also informs higher order decisions about strategy and task selection(Fig. 6305A).
