ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2014
Remembering the best and worst of times: memories for extreme outcomes bias risky decisions.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Gambling on an empty stomach: Hunger modulates preferences for learned but not described risks.Brain and behavior · 2023Trial
- Posterior parietal cortex mediates rarity-induced decision bias.National science review · 2026Article
- Effects of Initial Experiences on Risky Choice.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Toward the cognitive modeling of dynamic decision making.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The impact of sampling bias on preferences for skewed distributions in decisions from experience.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Choosing certainty over risk: Associations of PTSD symptom severity with memory sampling during experiential decision making.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2025Article
- Memory as a foundation for approach and avoidance decisions: A fertile area for research.Memory & cognition · 2025Review
- Human reinforcement learning processes and biases: computational characterization and possible applications to behavioral public policy.Mind & society · 2025Article
- The Relative Contributions of Traits and Contexts on Social Network Learning.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Influence of surprise on reinforcement learning in younger and older adults.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Forensic interviewers' difficulty with the birthday narrative.Child abuse & neglect · 2024Article
- Rare and extreme outcomes in risky choice.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- The Future of Decisions From Experience: Connecting Real-World Decision Problems to Cognitive Processes.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Reward conditioning may not have an effect on category-specific memory.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Back to the future: Progressing memory research in eating disorders.The International journal of eating disorders · 2023Article
- Learning strategy impacts medical diagnostic reasoning in early learners.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- Mixing memory and desire: How memory reactivation supports deliberative decision-making.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
- Valence biases in reinforcement learning shift across adolescence and modulate subsequent memory.eLife · 2022Article
- Advances in modeling learning and decision-making in neuroscience.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- Cognitive and neural principles of a memory bias on preferential choices.Current research in neurobiology · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
When making decisions on the basis of past experiences, people must rely on their memories. Human memory has many well-known biases, including the tendency to better remember highly salient events. We propose an extreme-outcome rule, whereby this memory bias leads people to overweight the largest gains and largest losses, leading to more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses. To test this rule, in two experiments, people repeatedly chose between fixed and risky options, where the risky option led equiprobably to more or less than did the fixed option. As was predicted, people were more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses. In subsequent memory tests, people tended to recall the extreme outcome first and also judged the extreme outcome as having occurred more frequently. Across individuals, risk preferences in the risky-choice task correlated with these memory biases. This extreme-outcome rule presents a novel mechanism through which memory influences decision making.
Indexed as
Identifiers
24189991What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.