Thinking, Judgement, and Decision Making Flashcards
What is Gastrophysics?
○ Charles spence argues that food is not just experienced by using the sense of taste
○ The multisensory integration from all other senses will directly influence what food tastes like
○ This means other sensory information will not only change the overall experience (which is also important), but directly chance the experienced taste of the food
○ Spence calls the field investigating this multisensory interplay “gastrophysics” (the name is borrowed from psychophysics, the field that investigates the relationship between objective qualities of stimuli and experienced sensory qualities
Explain how sound impacts taste perceptions
- “sonic seasoning”
- Matching the food with the sounds
- But can you change the taste of food by adding sounds? Potentially use ‘sweet sounds’ that make the food sound sweeter
Explain how the tongue impacts taste perceptions
- Basic tastes come from the tongue: sweet, sour, bitter, salty (maybe umami)
- What about fruity, smoky, herbal, burnt, and others?
- These are flavours, and they emerge when smell is added
The classical tongue mapping is probably not true - there are relative differences, but great variability between people
Explain how smell impacts taste perception
- Smell adds to the taste experience, but we do not realise this but ‘project’ the experience onto the tongue (‘oral referral’)
- There is orthonasal (sniffing external aromas) and retronasal (aromatic odour is received through the back of the mouth into the back of the nose during food consumption)
- Both contribute to the perception of taste (try to eat something with your nose closed)
- The rich perception of aroma comes from the retronasal route
- Can you create the right smell to compliment the food?
○ You should be able to add to the taste with certain smells
○ Infused the smoke with ‘forest smell’ to make the meal taste more earthy:
How does vision impact taste perception?
- The brain is optimised for vision
- Visual food cues are the most commonly used stimuli in our environment, probably because we’re hard-wired to respond to them so strongly
- “Tasting” the colour?
- People do have surprisingly similar ideas of how colours and taste qualities are associated
- What happens if you expect a different taste because of the colour?
- Adding ‘sweetness’ to a drink by getting the colour right?
- Using differently coloured plates can change the taste experience
- Using different shapes of plates may also impact on the taste experience - round plates make food taste sweeter and liked more
- But findings do not necessarily replicate in the lab
- Does it make a difference to your tastes experience how your latte is presented?
○ Yes it does - There are international competitions for latte art
- People reported higher willingness to pay, expected to like it more, and for it to be less intense
- In a real-world (but not well controlled) café experiment, willingness-to-pay differences were replicated, but not differences in linking
- People expected to like coffee with a star shape art better, expected it to be less bitter and of a higher quaity
- In a real tasting experiment perceived quality differences replicated
Explain the wine experiment exploring how expectations can influence taste perception
- Some wines labelled differently:
○ Wine 1: $5 or $45
○ Wine 2: $10 or $90
○ Wine 3: $35- Participants rated taste pleasantness after tasting wines while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) conducted
- People like the same wine significantly more when priced higher
○ So people liked the same wine more when it was said to be more expensive
○ In a follow up study 8 weeks later without price information, difference in the taste experience goes away - The price effect was also evident in neural activity differences in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a brain region involved in decision-making and integration of sensory experience
- Several other brain regions were found, such as ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortext (dlPFC), which are involved in different aspects of decision-making and conflict detection/procession
Are we the same ‘decision-makers’ after consuming food and drinks?
○ People were showed a cue (blue dot), that they knew indicated some reward (could be no reward, small, medium, or large), and the reward was a bit of juice
○ Then got them to press a button when they predicted the halfway point in a given time slot
○ Figured if people were getting big rewards, they would press it sooner because they would want it again
○ But actually, time estimates gets longer with larger juice rewards
○ People judged time intervals differently after consuming sweet, high-caloric juice
○ The effect disappears for a sweet but calorie-neutral solution, but also observed for a taste-neutral but high-caloric solution
§ So it is the calories that drives this response
Do we make different decisions when we consume calories (even if not yet digested)?
Had a fake coin with different amounts that can be listed, you know it can have the potential for a maximum of 50c, but you don’t know how long you will have to wait to get that - test for patience. When is it the point that people just choose to go to the next trial?
In one condition, they gave participants water, and the other were given high-caloric liquid
○ Found that the probability for the decision to wait for monetary reward is reduced after consuming high caloric liquid relative to water
○ So people think they don’t have to wait because they have already consumed a high-calorie reward
* So these decisions that have nothing to do with food at all, can be influenced by your consumption
Do we need to consciously think about big decisions? What happens when we ‘sleep on it’ and suddenly ‘know’ our decisions?
- Sometimes we seem to ‘just know’ the outcome: this is referred to as ‘unconscious thought’, or deliberation in the absence of conscious attention
Describe Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT)
- Dijksterhuis and colleagues (2006) tested predictions of Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT):
○ Conscious decisions to follow rules ( “I don’t want to spend more than $10,000 on a car”)
○ Unconscious thought, however, is better when decisions are more complex, because the unconscious mind is not capacity-limited
§ Simple choices should be better when made with conscious thought, and complex decisions should benefit from unconscious thought - Study 1: 4 conditions where participants were given either a simple problem (thinking of a car with 4 attributes), or a complex problem (thinking of a car with 12 attributes), paired with either conscious thought (thinking about it for 4 mins), or unconscious though (being distracted for 4 mins)
○ They found that when there are 4 attributes, people chose the better car in the conscious thought condition
○ With 12 attributes, better choices were made in the unconscious thought condition- In study 3, they asked people how satisfied they were with purchasse decisions for items of different complexity when they:
○ Thought about them (conscious thought)
○ Made spontaneous decisions (unconscious thought)
- In study 3, they asked people how satisfied they were with purchasse decisions for items of different complexity when they:
- in study 3, they found that participants were more satisfied with their conscious ourchase choices for simple problems (eg buying shampoo); but were more satisfied with their unconscious thoughts for more complex problems (eg buying a room or a plane ticket)
- In study 4, they asked people, who did their shopping in two different shops (one that sells complex things and one that sells simple things) how much they thought about their purchase
○ A few weeks later, they conducted phone interviews and asked how satisfied they were with the products. Again, they found that people who made unconscious purhcase decisions were more satisfied with more complex purchases (eg from IKEA buying furniture). Whereas, conscious thinkers were more satisfied with their simple purchases (eg from Bijenkorf which sells cloths and kitchen accessories)
- In study 4, they asked people, who did their shopping in two different shops (one that sells complex things and one that sells simple things) how much they thought about their purchase
Describe the effect of subtle cues in unconscious goal pursuit
- Study: Unconscious priming of the goal to achieve
○ Bargh and colleagues (2001) asked students to work on (seemingly unrelated) language puzzles
○ Some puzzles contained words related to achievement, while others did not
§ students who solved the achievement-word puzzles outperformed the others in a second puzzle
§ students who solved the achievement-word puzzles were also more persistent, and showed more flexibility in other tests- Other studies have shwon similar findings supporting the effect of subtle cues:
○ People become more competitive when seeing a leather briefcase on the desk in an office
○ People talk more softly when looking at a library picture on the wall
○ People clean their table more often when cleaning agent scent is in the air
- Other studies have shwon similar findings supporting the effect of subtle cues:
How does unconscious activation of a goal representation lead to goal pursuit?
- unconscious activation of a goal representation leads to preparation of action (motor preparation is often done unconsciously: ideas of the movement can already trigger the movement; primining of simple actions might activate respective neural programs) and detection of positive reward signal (rewards are also detected unconsciously: neural reward structures activated by subliminal rewarding cues like sex and food; eg task effort is higher when monetary reward was presented subliminally), both of which combined lead to goal pursuit.
-This suggests that we do not necessarily need consciousness for selecting goals
Describe unconscious biases on decision-making (nudges)
- Besides decision processes potentially being initiated without consciousness, there are also influences of unconscious cues - or nudges - on decision processes
- The effect of nudges can be understood in the context of evidence accumulation models (eg the Diffusion Decision Model - DDM)
- The models have been applied to various decision problems and characterise at a conceptual level how we continuously sample information until reaching a ‘decision threshold’
- The idea of nudges is that they bias the decision-making process
○ They might shift the starting point of the process towards one threshold
§ This means, because people are already primed towards the healthy option, the same processing of ‘pro-healthy’ information as before would be enough to reach the decision threshold for the salad
§ In this case, the nudge makes it more likely to make a decision for the healthy option
○ They might also shift the decision thresholds/boundaries
^In this example, the nudge might make people consider more information before reaching a decision
^In this second example, the nudge would secretively make the people consider less information for one of the options before making a decision` - Nudges might be more effective in influencing decisions, which are not under conscious control, as conscious control could counteract the nudges by decision threshold setting
- Nudges might also impact on the rate at which information/evidence is sampled (often call drift rate)
○ For example, if the smell of the brownie biases you
Are nudges ethical?
○ Should nudges only be used for ‘good goals’? Eg smoking prevention or healthy eating?
○ Should we give people all information instead of using nudging?
○ Are we ever in a ‘nudge free’ environment?
○ Even if there are no nudges in our environment at a given moment, is the internalised context (our memory) also a nudge?
Describe Information for reward maximisation
- Classical perspective: Active information seeking should depend on the possibility to maximise rewards
○ Instrumental Valuation Theory- Humans are suboptimal in information processing and prone to biases
○ Eg Good-News-Bad-News effect; confirmation bias - If your team wins, you have always been ‘the expert’, but if your team loses, there were ‘exceptional circumstances’
- There may be multiple reasons to actively seek out information, not only instrumentality
- Humans are suboptimal in information processing and prone to biases
- eg biases of: Action (instrumental utility), Affect (hedonic utility), and cognition (cognitive utility) together (with individual differences) lead to information value, which leads to information seek/avoid response
What is non-instrumental information
Monkeys strongly prefer informative cues (80-100%) about the amount of a reward, and they are willing to sacrifice rewards for such information
Would we pay for watching a lottery, even though we can influence the outcome (and they tell us if we win anyway)?
Experimental task: would people accept a cost for watching the informative set of cards (indicative of winning a lottery) being successfully revealed?
-Found that people participants were willing to pay even though the information was ‘non-instrumental’
-Participants also accepted physical effort costs
Does choosing your own lottery bias willingness to pay for non-instrumental information?
-Study found that choosing one’s own lottery increased confidence in winning: ‘Illusion of Control Effect (IOC)’
-Modelling results showed that choosing one’s lottery independently increased willingness to pay for information, in particular for medium probability levels of winning
-People would again pay for non-instrumental info
-Preference showed preference for ‘positively valenced’ information (eg winning)
-The tendency to pay for useless (non-instrumental) information correlates positively - and independently - with obsessive compulsive personality traits and anxiety
Are humans willing to pay for information? Why?
- Humans are willing to pay for information
- Neural correlates point towards overlapping network for reward and information
- Some researchers even suggest a ‘common currency’ in the brain
- The cognitive drivers might be diverse:
○ Anxiety reduction (via reduction of uncertainty) vs curiosity
○ Updating cognitive models (eg agentic choices are usually more informative)
○ Adaptive for survival via ‘hard wired’ preference for information (eg searching for a better food source)
Explain the difference between anxiety and fear
- Anxiety and fear share many common physiological features, but they can be differentiated
○ Fear responses are elicited by specific stimuli and tend to be shortlived
○ Fear responses decrease when a threat has ben removed or dissipated
○ Anxiety may be experienced in the absence of any direct physical threat and typically persists over a longer period of time- Several prominent theories of Anxiety Disorder propose that dysregulation of the neurcircuitry of conditioned fear may be central to the disorder
- Neuroimaging studies indicate that trait anxiety is associated with the heightened amygdala activation and elevated fear expression
- Anxiety also impairs extinction learning and retention, as well as the regulation of emotional responses via cognitive strategies
- These deficits appear to stem from impairments in the regulation by PFC of the amygdala
- For example, anxious patient exhibit reduced prefrontal activation during or before fear extinction, and require heightened prefrontal recruitment to successfully reduce negative emotion with cognitive reappraisal
Describe conditioned fear experiments
- Conditioned fear experiments have been used to understand the function of the cortical regions in fear processing
○ Where neutral stimulus (tone) acquires aversive properties by virtue of being paired with an aversive event (electric shock) and produces a conditioned fear response (CR), (eg anxiety, nausea)
○ After multiple pairings, presenting the tone alone will produce the conditioned fear response
○ Conditioned fear can be diminished via.a number of techniques
§ Extinction, presenting the tone repeatedly without the shock, resulting in a gradual decrease in the conditioned fear response
§ Extinction is the basis for graded desensitisation training in psychological practice
What is systematic desensitisation?
- Developed in the 1950s by Dr Joseph Wolpe
- An intervention that attempts to replace an anxiety or fear response with a relaxation response through a classical conditioning procedure
- You gradually associate, through repeated pairing, a fear-arousing stimulus with a state of relaxation, in a series of graded steps
Explain extinction of a conditioned fear
- Animal and human research with conditioned fear paradigms have demonstrated that fear can return AFTER successful extinction training
○ After the passage of time (spontaneous recovery)
○ Changes in context (renewal effect)
○ Stress (reinstatement effect)- The return of the conditioned fear response has been interpreted as evidence that the original ‘fear memory’ is not deleted, or erased, but rather inhibited during the extinction phase of conditioning experiments
Explain neurocircuitry of fear conditioning
- A network or structures including the amygdala, hippocampus, ventromedial PFC, dorsolateral PFC and striatum
- During cogntivie regulation, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) regulates fear expression through projections to the vmPFC, which in turn inhibits amygdala activity
- Cognitive regulation strategies include
○ Reinterpret the significance of an event (cognitive reappraisal)
○ Focus attention on the less fearful aspects of a situation (selective attention)
Explain neurocircuitry in active coping for fear
- Active coping
○ During active coping, information from the LA is routed not to the CE, which drives fear expression, but to the B, which in turn projects to the striatum. The striatum is thought to reinforce the instrumental action taken during escaape-from fearor avoidance learning
○ Active coping is argued to be the most commonly used ‘untaught’ methodwe use to regulate our emotions
○ Active coping strategies involve an awareness of the stressor, followed by attempts to reduce the negative outcome
○ We specifically engage in actions that result in positive emotional outcomes and as a result, avoid negative consequences of fear
○ Learn an action to avoid a fearful event or diminish the fear response
○ Examples: exercise, yoga,
○ Less ‘active’ but frequestly observed are behaviours such as rocking, vocalising tics
Explain neurocircuitry in reconsolidation of fear
○ Reconsolidation diminishes conditioned fear expression through alteration of the original CS–US association stored in the LA.
○ Newer technique to regulate emotion, linked to the idea that immediately after learning there is a period of time where a memory is fragile, less permenant
§ This can be an issue for further exacerbation of the trauma of th ememory, rather than allowing to remain at the level it was when the person encountered it
§ Can also be an issue for bystanders recalling a crime - could be subject to warping ased on the cues they have been given in the interview
○ During the consolidation period, you actively seek to disrupt the formation of the
Memory
○ Or, if you are past the consolidation period, you look to modify or inhibit, but not
eliminate, the memory, by actively retrieving the memory
○ The act of retrieval makes the underlying memory trace fragile again, called the reconsolidation period
○ The reconsolidation period provides another opportunity to disrupt the memory, potentially allowing you to block the memory completely
○ Animal studies show that blockade of the reconsolidation period with protein synthesis inhibitors specifically blocks the reactivation of fear memories, but leaving other memories intact
○ Fear memories undergoing reconsolidation blockade using this method did not return with time, alteration od context cues or additional stress
○ Human research has been slow to emerge because of the need for a safe drug to block human reconsolidation
○ Propanalol was the first drug to be used for experimental reconsolidation blocker
§ Kindt et al. (2009), Schiller et al. (2010) and Debiec and LeDoux (2004) were
the first to show that in humans you could use propranolol to block the return of
Fear
§ Still not clear what the mechanism for propranolol’s effects are
§ Propanolol has now been trialled in RCTs for PTSD (Brunet et al. 2008),
Substance dependence (Lonergan et al. 2016)
§ Kohler et al. (2015) trialled a similar technique in major depression, arguing that
reducing the emotional load of autobiographical memories that are linked to
etiology and maintenance of the depression would be therapeutic
§ Most studies have failed to show clear beneficial effects in human studies
What are the cognitive effects of anxiety?
- A large body of research highlights two key cognitive information processing biases that are characteristic of people with anxiety
1) A bias to attend toward threat-level information
§ ^If people are over-sensitive to threat, you present them with the fixation cross followed by the two stimuli. Angry face is threat, neutral face is not. Then a star appears on the screen, and participants are asked to respond with their hand on the side that the star appears on. They are faster in responding to the side when the star appears on the side of the threatening face
§ Gets people to do this task repeatedly , and repeatedly pairing the location of the star with the non-threatening stimulus
□ The reason for this, is with the goal of extinguishing the threat-related response
2) A bias toward negative interpretation of ambiguous stimuli
§ For stimuli with more than one potential interpretation, people with anxiety have a tendency toward a more negative perception
□ Ambiguous facial expressions
□ Face-voice pairings
□ Verbal homophones
® Eg people with anxiety are more likely to spell the word (dye/die) as die
§ When evaluating the probability of future life events, individuals with anxiety will judge the probability of negative outcomes as far more likely than non-anxious controls
Explain the link between anxiety and economic decision making
- Attentional Bias and Negative evaluation studies suggest that the hyperactivity of the amygdala, while attending to, evaluating or anticipating negative stimuli, contributes to heightened cognitive and affective responses to potential threat stimuli
- prefrontally mediated cognitive and affective regulation processes also appear to be impaired in anxiety, reducing the ability to modulate these pre-existing tendencies
Explain the link between uncertainty, anxiety, and economic decision making
○ Across species, stimuli that are unpredictable elicit greater anxiety
○ When we are required to make a decision about a predictable stimuli, people with anxiety will show threat-related information processing biases that alter their decision-making
○ Because of the way they manage Risk:
§ When required to make a decision between uncertain choices, humans as a general trait will be risk averse
§ For all, amount of attention given to the aversive choice option predicts the likelihood of avoiding that option
-Dohmen et al., 2011 analysed the relationship between the response to a 10 point risk question, and other variables in 22 000 participants
-7% of respondents indicated a ‘0’, or ‘not at all willing to take risks’
-they had 4 variables to examine, given the nature of the survey: gender, height, age, and parental academic achievement
-Women were less likely to take risks than men
-Increasing age was associated with less risk tolerance
-Greater height was associated with greater risk tolerance
-Having a mother with higher academic achievement, and to a lesser extent, a father increased risk tolerance
§ Measures of trait anxiety, worry, social anxiety and other measures of anxiety have consistently shown that in choice paradigms that correlate with greater risk avoidance/aversion § Importantly, when the decision paradigm requires the anxious participant to make a choice for another person, they are less risk averse ○ Evaluating your own physiological response to a risky choice appears to be critical to risk avoidance in anxiety ○ If your evaluation of an option includes increase sympathetic nervous system responses (eg BP, HR, SCR increases), then anxious participants are more likely to avoid these options § Alcohol masks a lot of these responses, so in casinos they will provide alcohol (sometimes for free), to disguise the physiological responses, and increase the risk-taking behaviour
Explain the link between ambiguity, anxiety, and economic decision making
○ A decision where multiple possible outcomes with unknown probabilities must be chosen from
○ Like with the attentional bias effect, decisions between ambiguous options will illicit greater anxiety, and people with anxiety will show greater avoidance of ambiguous decision making
§ Eg choosing between a visible or opaque urn
□ Decisions between ambiguous options will elicit the greatest amount of anxiety. People who are anxious will try to avoid these situations, but if they have to, they will choose the option that provides them the least amount of info (?? Not sure about this tho)
□ Person with anxiety would rather leave it unknown, so would choose opaque
○ In ambiguous decision making situations, people with anxiety will overestimate the probability of negative outcomes, and their subjective cost
○ Car vs train example
§ Studies where people who have been in a train accident have been followed up. After they have recovered, there is a higher proportion of them who will choose to drive to work rather than take the train. But being in a car accident is much riskier - so they choose the riskier option by accident, because they overestimate the likelihood of a train accident because of their own experiences
§ Sense of control could also come into this, but there are lots of examples where control doesn’t come into it and the outcomes are generally still the same
Describe the link between framing and loss aversion
- Framing
○ Anxiety, trait and clinical, is associated with greater framing effects in their decision making
○ Argued to be driven by loss aversion, where the increased sensitivity to the certain loss engenders an avoidant response, increasing risk taking behaviour- Loss aversion
○ The degree to which avoiding losses is prioritized in comparison to achieving equivalent gains
○ Anxiety, of all forms, is associated with increased loss aversion - Economic decision making vs personal decision making in the context of psychological interventions
- Loss aversion
Describe how incidental emotions influence decision making
Incidental emotions carry over from one situation to the next, affecting decisions that should be unrelated
Incidental anger triggered in one situation automatically elicits a motive to blame individuals in other situations even though that targets of the anger have no relationship to the first trigger
Vignettes to elicit positive or negative moods influence risk perception
Johnson & Tversky (1983) found that inducing such moods influenced individual’s perception of fatality frequencies for potential causes of death
□ We’ve been speaking about fear, but there are also studies covering other emotions and how they impact appraisal - this table is just to demonstrate that point
Emotions shape decisions via the depth of thought
– Many studies have shown that negative emotions increase the depth of information processing,
signaling when a situation demands additional attention
– Not always a good thing
– Increased focus on anchoring effects, where individual ruminate over the first piece of
information given to them in a decision making process
– Increasing cognitive load can moderate these effects
– Small and Lerner (2008) showed that relative to neutral state participants, angry participants
allocated less to welfare recipients, and sad participants allocated more – an effect that could be
eliminated when given greater unrelated cognitive demands
How can Intervening reduce emotion effects
– Time delay
* The simplest strategy for minimizing the carryover effects of emotions on decision making it to ensure there is a
time delay
* Even 10-minute delays have been shown to mitigate the influence of anger on decision making (Gneezy and Imas,
2014)
– Supression
* Regulating or suppressing emotional responses has been tried as an internvention, but found to be ineffective
* Attempting to avoid feeling an emotion will reduce an individuals expression of the behavior, but not their
subjective experience of it
– Reappraisal
* Reframing and reappraising the meaning of stimuli that led to an emotional response has been found to tbe one of
the best strategies for dissipating the emotional response (Gross, 2002)
– Increasing awareness of misattribution
* LeDoux, 1996)
Define a habit
- Reinforcement learning research in animals identified a definition for habit
performance
○ the exhibition of a learned behavior that was insensitive to changes in rewarding
outcomes- In humans (and animals) the common features of habit learning are
○ Repeated responding that forms context-response associations in memory
○ Automatic habit performance that is relatively insensitive to changes in the value
of the response outcome - An important distinction to consider is that humans engage in much
repetition of behaviour
○ E.g., high levels of repetition in daily activities
○ A difficulty is distinguishing a habit from other every day activities
§ If a behaviour results in no positive outcome would you continue to do it? Probably not. A lot of behaviours started off as goal-directed behaviours. Is there any immediate positive outcome to come from that behaviour (eg there is from charging a phone - so not a habit, whereas brushing teeth is a habit because the benefit is long-term and intangible)
- In humans (and animals) the common features of habit learning are
Describe the relationship between habits and goal-related behaviours
- Habits typically arise due to an interface with goal-related behavior
○ Goals direct human action by providing a definition of a desired outcome
§ Reflexes are different from reflexes - because habits can originate from goal-directed behaviour
§ Chewing nails for example, is a habit through negative reinforcement - it takes something away to make the experience better. Trciky example because the amount of it negatively reinforcing will differ between individuals. It negatively reinforces by distracting - hence the removal
○ Repetitious behavior is usually, but not necessarily, goal related and can be
distinguished from habit behavior because it does not persist when the value of the
repeated behavior is absent
How do habits differ from automatic responses?
- All habits have a level of automaticity, but not all automatic responses are habits
○ E.g., Startle reflex is an automatic response, but it is not a habit- Habits differ from other automatic processes because they can be manipulated through:
○ Priming
○ Classical conditioning
○ Non-associative learning - Priming a particular goal, or attitude, can result in a range of responses
- Implementation intentions (often referred to as automated goals) will only
influence behavior insofar as they are consistent with someone’s motivation
level or intention
○ Gets people to commit to continuing that behaviour to make it more likely to be repeated. Eg going to the dentist and they ask you at the end of your appointment when you are coming back
○ These don’t help with habits though - Habit automaticity is specific to a particular response or behavior
○ A range of cues can trigger habit behaviour
○ Cue related to an individuals physical environment
○ People and their behaviour
○ Preceding actions in a sequence
§ This is seen a lot in drug and alcohol behaviour. Once someone starts the first step of a sequence, it’s as though the individual does not have control and they will follow through to the end of the sequence. Each step cues/relates to the next step in the sequence
§ Eg Cigarette when at a bar or with alcohol. When people are trying to quit smoking, a common difficulty is when the individual is in an environment where they have historically smoked consistently (eg bar)
- Habits differ from other automatic processes because they can be manipulated through:
Describe habit triggers
When habits are formed, perception of the relevant context cue
automatically activates the the mental representation of the
habitual response
Habits can be triggered/cued in deliberate or inadvertent ways
Eg being shown this picture of a library can trigger the response for people to feel the need to study
○ Advertising often taps into contextual components and emotional components to try and build associations which may lead to a habit involving their product
Describe the relationship between habits and perception
- A habitual response is the cueing of mental representation that
contains both the features of your response, but also the features
of perceptual information that cues your response.
○ Neal et al. 2012
○ Uni students who went to the college’s sports stadium on a regular basis,
when exposed to a picture of the stadium, would raise the volume of their
voices during conversation with the experimenter
§ Example of locational cue that influences unconscious behaviour
○ Hogarth et al. 2012, QJEP
○ In animal literature, what they use is outcome-specific devaluation.
○ They tried to build up habitual behaviour and response in people, and see if they could get people to stop exhibiting that behaviour
○ Everytime participants gave a specific response, they would give them chocolate as a reward. They tried extinction methods and stopped giving the reward, and looked at how long it took participants to stop giving the desired response in the absence of reward
○ Something abuot human habitual behaviour, is that we tend to view rewards only as such until satiation (eg eating too much chocolate, so reward is devalued). That isn’t seen (or to a lesser extent) in animals)
○ Impulsive people were more driven by habitual cues
§ Suggests that people who are more impulsive are not necessarily as goal-driven, and are more reflexive to the information provided
What is habit insensitivity?
- Habit performance is characterised by the insensitivity to the outcomes
○ Instrumental learning experiments, like Hogarth et al. 2012, demonstrate
that participants who receive extensive training in choosing a reward (or
pair a reward with a stimulus), will make habitual but unwanted choices
in response to the cue even after being satiated
What is a consequence of habit insensitivity?
- One consequence for this finding is that repeated behavior over
time will become more habitual and less goal dependent
○ Social and Health psychologists have been able to use this understanding
to conduct prediction studies around social and health behaviours
○ For example, in studying health behaviours, a persons stated behavioural
intentions are a better predictor of future performance for occasional
activities (e.g., cancer screening, vaccination), but not frequent activities
(e.g., brushing teeth, drinking water, wearing a seatbelt, washing hands)
How do habits interact with behavioural intentions?
- Habit strength will also interact with behavioural intentions
○ When habit strength is high for a certain behavior, behavioural intentions will be less
predictive, but when habit strength is low, behavioural intentions will increase in predictive
Power
○ Gardner et al.
○ Blood donation frequency over a longitudinal study indicated an interaction between habit
strength and intentions
○ Participants with strong habits to donate blood did not show a relationship between
intentions and actual donations, only those with weak habits showed a relationship wherein
strong behavioural intentions predicted more frequent donation.
Why do we have habits?
○ Dual Process models argue that habitual behavior exists because it offers a greater level of
Efficiency
○ Habits are a ready default setting for behavior that allow us to respond, unless we are particularly
motivated and able to engage in more deliberate and specific goal pursuit.
Describe habit formation
- Habits develop through instrumental learning
○ Rewarded responses will be repeated – Thorndike
○ Everyday life is built upon repetition that provides multiple opportunities
for habit formation
○ Experience Sampling studies asking participants about their thoughts and
actions, once every hour, found that over 40% of responses were
performed daily and in the same physical context (Khare and Inman,
2006)
○ In many of these studies, participants reported that they did not
consciously realise the repeated association between their behavior and
the context
How do habitual responding and motivation cues relate?
- Habitual responding continues to be influenced by motivational
Processes
○ Pavlovian Context Cues are cues that become associated with the reward
that follows the action
○ The cues can increase the likelihood of a habitual behavior being
Expressed
○ The motivational effect of these cues is not related to the value of the
Outcome
§ It was important to the uptake of the behaviour but not the continuation
○ Interval schedules are an example of a Pavlovian Context Cue and animal
studies (Balleine and O’Doherty, 2010) demonstrate that habits develop
most readily when rewards are provided on an interval schedule
○ An interval schedule means that responses are only rewarded after a
period of time has elapsed, increasing (or decreasing) response rate during
the interval does not change the amount of reward delivery
○ It is thought that this particular schedule has ecological validity, insofar as
it mimics the way that natural resources are replenished over time (e.g.,
rainfall)
Eg checking phone - we keep checking phones to see if we have notification, but it does not mean we will have any notifications, yet we keep doing it
○ You can titrate the reward schedule in gambling to maximise the habit formed in want of the reward with the least frequent reward schedule
What are interval schedules?
Interval schedules for reward are argued to positively influence habit
learning because we can form associations between context and response,
without having to have a representation of the goal or outcome of the
Action
Also avoids reward satiation
We can respond to a stimulus repeatedly, resulting in repetition and
automatization of our response, with occasional and unpredictable
rewards ensuring that the behavior doesn’t extinguish
We might continue to repeat a response, just in case this time is a longer
than usual interval
In gambling, this can look like ‘magical thinking’ - “if I press it with my left hand twice, and the right hand twice, that’s the secret code to the reward”
○ Patient-controlled pain relief results in patient using less pain relief. If they can ask someone else to be in control of it, they will keep asking and keep being given it because they are not responsible for the dose
Does repetition always lead to habit formation?
○ If the repetition of a behavior includes decision making, it will generally prevent, or slow, the
formation of habitual behavior
○ Deliberative decision making protects against habit formation even when you respond
repeatedly to the exact same cue
What has research shown in terms of extent of training and expression of habits?
- Human Research has typically not seen a relationship between the extent of
training (or repetition) and greater expression of habits (it has for animals, but not humans)
○ De Wit et al. 2018 conducted 5 different experiments with three different reward devaluation
paradigms, and found that the duration of stimulus-response training was not associated with
habit expression
Why is it important that studies have found a relationship between training extent and habit expression in animals (not for humans)?
○ The fact that this has been found in animals is important for 2 reasons
§ Animal studies have been used as a basis for clinical treatment in humans. Means we need to be more sceptical on how we can go about instilling or disrupting human habits
§ This also might mean that humans have capacity and abilities beyond what animals have (eg maybe more self-control and less impulsivity)
○ An implication for our understanding of habitual behavior in conditions such as Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder and Drug Dependence
○ Individuals may be more prone to developing habits after extensive training (see Linnebank
et al., 2018), but that conditions such as OCD may be an interaction between propensity for
habit learning combined with impairments in goal-directed control
○ Self-control abilities, such as impulse control and response inhibition aid people to control
their habitual responses
○ Sustained or temporary impairment to them can contribute to the greater tendency to express
habitual behaviour
§ Eg with alcohol and drug consumption, they have already had to have used reduced inhibition control to start drinking/taking drugs, and given that they impair your inhibition control further this becomes self-perpetuating
§ Also because of the tolerance
Describe the habit neurocircuit
- Across animal and human research, converging evidence indicates that
habitual behavior is mediated by circuits that link cortical brain areas and the
basal ganglia
○ The basal ganglia is a subcortical structure, that houses a collection of subcortical nuclei
This is a subcorticol to cortical relationship that is important in habit formation and maintenance
○ Associative cortico-basal ganglia loops support goal directed and habitual
behavior
§ Prefrontal cortex links to caudate nucleus and anterior putamen for goal directed action
§ Sensorimotor loop that connects somatosensory, motor cortex with the medial and
posterior putamen for habitual behaviours
○ Dorsolateral striatum appears critical to acquiring new habits
○ Dorsomedial striatum appears critical to goal-directed control
What factors influence the balance between habits and goal pursuit?
- The balance between habits and goal pursuit can be influenced by a number of
situational factors
○ Distraction
○ Time pressure
○ Task ability (or lack thereof)
○ Self-control- Habits will trump goal-directed behavior when they lack the
ability and motivation to engage in deliberative decision making
○ Eg netflix removes the decision-making component as a whole, by introducing the automatic ‘next episode’ timer - Acute and Chronic stress, which have a bidirectional relationship
with factors like distraction, time pressure, task ability and self
control, will increase the reliance on habits
- Habits will trump goal-directed behavior when they lack the
What is the relationship between habits and awareness?
- People have some awareness of their habitual responses, but they have poor
awareness of the cueing mechanism that activates the habit- One aspect of this lack of awareness is that participants with stronger habits
will have a greater tendency to infer that behavior was guided by their
behavioural intentions (or goals) – Neal et al. 2012 - Over time, goals can be formed as a consequence of habitual behavior, rather
than preceding it - For example, habits can become reinforced because of the ease with which
they can be performed when compared to more deliberative, and potentially
uncertain alternatives
○ Choosing the same seat in the lecture theatre, food for lunch, carriage for train ride, are all
potentially habitual behaviours that are no longer tied to reward, but are reinforcing because
of their ease and reduction of uncertainity
- One aspect of this lack of awareness is that participants with stronger habits
What are common behaviour change techniques for habits?
- Behaviour change and public health initiatives are increasingly seen as critical
to addressing some of our major illness categories- Meta-analyses (e.g., Webb & Sheeran, 2006) of successful behavior change
interventions indicate that effective techniques, such as persuasive appeals, are
effective tools for sporadic behaviours, but not behaviours that required habit
formation - Behaviour change techniques have difficulty changing habitual behavior
because the responses do not reflect a persons stated intention or desire - The major challenge is that habitual behavior continue to be activated
automatically by recurring environmental cues - In response, behavior change techniques have focused on two aspect
○ 1) impede the automatic cueing of old, unwanted habits
2) encourage the repeated use of new, desired behaviours to the point they become habitual
- Meta-analyses (e.g., Webb & Sheeran, 2006) of successful behavior change
Explain how to impede unwanted habit performance
Behaviour change techniques to reduce interference from old habits have
attempted to increase mechanisms of inhibition
Invoked thinking (Quinn et al. 2010)
Trying to insert thoughts about not performing a certain behavior, and then monitoring specifically
for failures
Inhibitory Plans (Adriaanse et al. 2010)
Attempting to link specific inhibitory plans to time or environmental cues
that are linked to the habitual behavior
E.g., After I get home from work I’ll take the dog for a walk, rather than snacking before dinner
^*invoked thinking and inhibitory plans are difficult to implement when the behaviour still needs to be done at time (eg changing diet can be difficult, because eating is still necessary so the cue can’t be removed)
Exposure Management or habit discontinuity (e.g., Thogersen, 2012)
Habit performance is prompted by environmental cues, so by reducing exposure to the
environment, or changing the environment, you can reduce the continuity of habit performance
that reinforces it
Life transitions (e.g., moving from school to University) can be a very powerful tool for habit
Change
§ Due (at least in part), to the removal of environmental cues
How to encourage the formation of desired habits?
- Behaviour change techniques to encourage the formation of desired habits
have not always been built upon the concepts of habit formation: repetition,
stable context, appropriate reward schedules
○ Repetition required can be extensive
§ Lally et al. (2010) found that between 18 and 254 days of repeating a simple exercise behavior –
Walking after dinner – was required for habit formation
§ Making a gym visit habitual appears to take 6 weeks, if you go 4 times a week (Kaushal and
Rhodes, 2015)
○ Reminders can reduce automaticity
§ Interventions that provide external prompts for behaviours via electronic
devices have had limited success
□ Because if they are sent out at a constant time for everyone, it may not be at a time that it possible for the participant to engage in the desired behaviour, or they might not be sent out around the time of the maladaptive habit. Works better if location on the phone is enabled, and with geolocated bars (for example) to send tailored reminders ot the individual and environment
§ Reminders may disrupts automaticity, limit the stability of context and
engage more deliberate decision making
What should you consider before turning to neuroimaging?
-Neuroimaging is expensive, complicated, correlational
-prior to doing a brain imaging experiment, ask yourself if you have questions about the brain, behaviour, both, or something else
- ○ ^ the brain is so complicated, we can’t actually say X area controls the reward system - we only know that they might be related, not definitively that the brain area causes a certain response
○ Think carefully about the question - if it is about behaviour, then you probably won’t need brain studies. They might be interesting, but it may not be worth all of the money and resources
What is neuroeconomics?
- “By combining both theoretical and empirical tools from neuroscience, psychology, and economics into a single approach, the resulting synthesis will provide insights valuable to all three disciplines” Prof Paul Glimcher
- Neuroscience = the neural underpinnings of behaviour and mind
- Psychology = science of behaviour and mind
- Economics = science of choice
Describe economics to predict behaviour
- Economics as a discipline is most focused on understanding the exchange of goods, services, information etc
- Classic = supply & demand
○ Supply goes up, demand goes down and vice versa
○ You can decrease the amount of items there are in the market which would artifically increase the deman (eg limited edition) - What determines the ‘price’ the consumer is willing to ‘pay’
○ Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it
- Classic = supply & demand
How do we best predict choice?
- Learning from observation
○ What people have done tells us what they might do
○ We could ask people why the chose something, but that requires them to have insight into why they did it - often this isn’t the case
What is objective value?
○ Things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them (ie subjective value)
- ○ Eg diamonds - There was a campaign from the diamond industry telling everyone that diamond is what people should have when they get married - they had celebrity endorsement, and they equated the amount of their partner’s love with the size of the diamond
○ What if the diamond suppliers volts were open - and everyone had greater access to them, but there was a severe drought - how much would it take for you to give diamonds away for water?
○ Availability and need are a huge part of value
How can we improve our predictions?
- Know the market
○ Is water readily available?
○ Supply and demand- Know the buyer/seller history
○ Has the buyer been willing to pay more than market cost?
○ Eg brand loyalty - Know the traits of buyer/seller
○ Is the seller risk averse?
○ Individual/group tendencies - Know the states of the buyer/seller
○ Is the buyer really thirsty?
○ Supply and dmeand - Traditional economics only permits us to observe
- Behavioural economics permits us to ask
- Neuroeconomics permits us to look at the brain regions that we think compute the value
- Know the buyer/seller history
Explain Kahneman & Tversky’s prospect theory
§ Saying that the choices people make are not rational
§ People don’t do what they ‘ought’ to do if we’re just taking into consideration the rational calculation of what should do - we are very loss averse
§ So the relationship between the objective value (or rational value), and the subjective value. This curve displays that the nature of the relationship between what something is actually worth, and what people think it’s worth. The bigger the loss, the stronger the feeling for someone to not be interested in that even if that loss process is something they rationally should engage in. That curve looks different for gains - in smaller amounts, the slope is different; in smaller amount the ratio of what people think something is worth changes really fast, with larger amounts there is a less subjective difference between the amounts (eg people will not consider them to be much of a difference between 10k and 11k, but a large difference between $5 and $10). So people consider gains and losses differently
§ We can multiple the amount that people weight the probabilities. People don’t view 50% as actually 50%. People tend to overestimate bad things (or low prob events) happening, and underestimate good things (or high prob events) happening.
§ If someone offers you $5 and you already have $5 in your pocket, the money won’t mean as much as if someone offers you a $5 sandwich. So the value of something is not actually how someone values something
- ○ The same amount of money could feel different if it’s a potential loss or potential gain
Explain the certainty effect in prospect theory
○ ^You are given two options
§ Option A is 95% chance you will get $10 000, and a 5% chance you will get nothing
§ Option B is 100% chance you will get $9, 499
§ Most people would choose B, even though A is a better option by $1
§ This is the certainty effect - people would rather make the choice where there is a certainty of getting something out of it
Explain Possibility effect in prospect theory
- Option A is 5% chance you will get $10 000, and a 95% chance you will get nothing (objective value is .05*10,000 = $500)
Option B is 100% chance you will get $501 - § Option B is the better gamble
§ Most people would go for A though
§ This is the possibility effect - the idea of getting a lot of money would make people more likely to choose that opportunity than the objectively more rational option
§ Also depends on what the amounts mean to the individual
Explain probability weighting according to Kahneman & Tversky
○ Diagonal line is real probability, if we’re following regular economics, everyone should behave according to the diagonal line - perfectly rational (actual probability aligns perfectly with the actual probability)
○ Curved line is people’s actual behaviour
○
○ When it comes to low probability events, people overestimate their occurrences (eg plane crash)
○ High probability events (eg getting in a car accident), are underestimated
* Values are not values, and probabilities are not actual probabilities either
○ People are not rational, people do not think about statistics in a traditional way when they are making decisions
§ They modify and modulate how they think about probabilities and statistics depending on how they think
§ If we can gauge what someone is like (eg more risk/loss averse, or more risky, then we can predict what they might choose a bit easier)
* A rational prediction of behaviour is still better than a random guess, even if it might not exactly map onto their behaviour though
* People with PTSD will look at probabilities very differently because of their past events
○ They will have a different mental model
○ Even if they know the actual probabilities, they have a very strong mental model, so their estimation of what will happen will be considerably differently
How do we model attitudes?
- We cannot rely on a single choice to provide us with an estimate of risk or loss attitudes. We must collect large samples of behaviour to get accurate estimates of an individual’s behavioural preferences
- We can then model their attitudes using a variety of approaches:
○ Model fitting (traditional vs bayesian)
§ In traditional, you get the mean of the group (a single value/line that can be fit to the data)
§ A Bayesian model operates on the idea that for each data point, there is a distribution/probability of data. So each data point represents a normal distribution, and then the line represents that mean of the distributions. So even you get a single average for an individual, it recognises a likely range for each individual
□ This is closer to reality - no one represents only one value
□ There is a theory about the fact that traits are characteristic/reflective of an accumulation of different states - so how anxious someone is for example, is represented by a range
□ This is at the individual level (you can do group level, called hierarchical bayesian analysis, but we are talking at an individual level rn)
- We can then model their attitudes using a variety of approaches:
