ArticleCurrent opinion in behavioral sciences2021
Context-sensitive valuation and learning.
Article in Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- How childhood adversity affects components of decision making.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Article
- Attention modulates value normalization in human reinforcement learning by shaping reward encoding.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Reference-point dependent reinforcement learning in humans and rats.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Predicting alcohol consumption and reward sensitivity using responses for natural sucrose reward in non-food-restricted rats.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Association of parental verbal responsivity with reduced mental health problems in preschool-aged children: a cross-sectional study of 21,366 dyads in western China.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Context effects in cognitive effort evaluation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Reward Reinforcement Creates Enduring Facilitation of Goal-directed Behavior.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Depressive symptoms among rural left-behind children and adolescents in China: a large-scale cross-sectional study.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Comparing experience- and description-based economic preferences across 11 countries.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- The role of the human hippocampus in decision-making under uncertainty.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Connected in Bad Times and in Good Times: Empathy Induces Stable Social Closeness.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Recent Opioid Use Impedes Range Adaptation in Reinforcement Learning in Human Addiction.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
- Social environment-based opportunity costs dictate when people leave social interactions.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Neural and computational underpinnings of biased confidence in human reinforcement learning.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Context-independent scaling of neural responses to task difficulty in the multiple-demand network.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Outcome context-dependence is not WEIRD: Comparing reinforcement- and description-based economic preferences worldwide.Research square · 2023Article
- Training diversity promotes absolute-value-guided choice.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Article
- Performance-gated deliberation: A context-adapted strategy in which urgency is opportunity cost.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A variety of behavioral and neural phenomena suggest that organisms evaluate outcomes not on an absolute utility scale, but relative to some dynamic and context-sensitive reference or scale. Sometimes, as in foraging tasks, this results in sensible choices; in other situations, like choosing between options learned in different contexts, irrational choices can result. We argue that what unites and demystifies these various phenomena is that the brain's goal is not assessing utility as an end in itself, but rather comparing different options to choose the better one. In the presence of uncertainty, noise, or costly computation, adjusting options to the context can produce more accurate choices.
Identifiers
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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.