Project Details
Description
Human beings make a vast number of decisions everyday consciously or unconsciously. A great number of decisions rely on memory processes. The choice of a particular alternative is to a great extent subject to and biased by what information is or is not retrieved from memory. Most theories of decision-making take into account the outcomes of previous decisions. However, the conception of memory delineated in most decision-making studies is rather simple when compared to recent behavioral and functional neuroimaging findings of mnemonics processes. The retrieval of the memory of a past decision and its context is simply considered as an all-or-none process and the decision-maker is viewed as a passive rememberer who exerts no control over the retrieval cues in a decision-making context. However, many studies have shown that people can actively vary the way a retrieval cue is processed contingent on the characteristics of the sought-for information. The current project aims to fill out this gap by investigating the roles of retrieval orientation and strategic retrieval in memory-guided decision-making. Specifically, we will focus on the retrieval of encoding context variability and its influences on decision-making under risk.A total of eight experiments are proposed in the current project. Experiments I and II will employ the ERPs in the exclusion tasks to investigate the retrieval orientation and strategic recollection of the variability of encoding context with indoor and outdoor scenes serve as the encoding contexts. Experiments III and IV will adopt similar designs that were used in the first two experiments but manipulate the magnitudes of gain or loss in a lottery as the variability of the encoding contexts. Experiments V and VI aim to investigate the modulation of the retrieval orientation and strategic retrieval of contextual variability on decision-making under risk. This goal will be achieved by incorporating a risky decision-making task into the context exclusion task developed in Experiments III and IV so that we will learn whether and how the retrieval of past decision context variability affects the risk-preference in the current risky decision-making. Experiments VII and VIII will employ fMRI and stereotactic electroencephalography (SEEG) to examine the interaction between the brain regions involved in decision-making (e.g., orbitofrontal cortex, ventral medial prefrontal cortex, striatum) and the recollection network (including the medial temporal lobe, the left posterior parietal cortex) supporting memory-guided decision-making.It is expected that the experiments proposed here will provide convergent evidence, which will advance our understanding of the interaction between the memory and decision-making from both the perspectives of cognitive and neurophysiological operations.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 1/08/18 → 31/07/19 |
Keywords
- Memory Retrieval
- Retrieval Orientation
- Strategic Retrieval
- Decision-Making
- Risk-Preference
- ERPs
- fMRI
- SEEG
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