ArticleNature communications2017
Reminders of past choices bias decisions for reward in humans.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 95 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.
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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
95 citing papers in PubMed, 253 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Interactive narratives reveal the personalizing effect of agency on episodic memory.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Noisy Memory Generates Value in Changing Environments.Adaptive behavior · 2025Article
- How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Episodic Memories Bias Contextual Threat Inferences after Aerobic and Mind-Body Exercise.Mental health and physical activity · 2025Article
- Effects of Episodic Memory Recall on Reinforcing Value of Physical Activity.Psychological reports · 2025Article
- Data-driven equation discovery reveals nonlinear reinforcement learning in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Temporal asymmetry of neural pattern similarity predicts recognition memory decisions.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Differentiating Reinforcement Learning and Episodic Memory in Value-Based Decisions in Parkinson's Disease.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Learning about causal relations that change over time: primacy and recency over long timeframes in causal judgments and memory.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Contributions of Attention to Learning in Multidimensional Reward Environments.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Reinforcement-Learning-Informed Queries Guide Behavioral Change.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Cognitive Graphs: Representational Substrates for Planning.Decision (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Surprising sounds influence risky decision making.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Working memory constraints for visuomotor retrieval strategies.Journal of neurophysiology · 2024Article
- The role of episodic memory sampling in evaluation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- How do humans learn about the reliability of automation?Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Causal learning with delays up to 21 hours.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
35 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We provide evidence that decisions are made by consulting memories for individual past experiences, and that this process can be biased in favour of past choices using incidental reminders. First, in a standard rewarded choice task, we show that a model that estimates value at decision-time using individual samples of past outcomes fits choices and decision-related neural activity better than a canonical incremental learning model. In a second experiment, we bias this sampling process by incidentally reminding participants of individual past decisions. The next decision after a reminder shows a strong influence of the action taken and value received on the reminded trial. These results provide new empirical support for a decision architecture that relies on samples of individual past choice episodes rather than incrementally averaged rewards in evaluating options and has suggestive implications for the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms.
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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.