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)