Publication Date

1-19-2024

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

Keywords

Decision making, Behavior, Skin physiology, Gambling, Learning, Finance, Foraging, Memory

Abstract

Context-dependence is fundamental to risky monetary decision-making. A growing body of evidence suggests that temporal context, or recent events, alters risk-taking at a minimum of three timescales: immediate (e.g. trial-by-trial), neighborhood (e.g. a group of consecutive trials), and global (e.g. task-level). To examine context effects, we created a novel monetary choice set with intentional temporal structure in which option values shifted between multiple levels of value magnitude ("contexts") several times over the course of the task. This structure allowed us to examine whether effects of each timescale were simultaneously present in risky choice behavior and the potential mechanistic role of arousal, an established correlate of risk-taking, in context-dependency. We found that risk-taking was sensitive to immediate, neighborhood, and global timescales: risk-taking decreased following large (vs. small) outcome amounts, increased following large positive (but not negative) shifts in context, and increased when cumulative earnings exceeded expectations. We quantified arousal with skin conductance responses, which were related to the global timescale, increasing with cumulative earnings, suggesting that physiological arousal captures a task-level assessment of performance. Our results both replicate and extend prior research by demonstrating that risky decision-making is consistently dynamic at multiple timescales and that the role of arousal in risk-taking extends to some, but not all timescales of context-dependence.

Copyright Date

12-15-2023

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights Holder

Hayley R. Brooks and Peter Sokol-Hessner

Provenance

Received from PLoS

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

24 pgs

File Size

1291 KB

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the Authors. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as

Brooks, H. R., & Sokol-Hessner, P. (2024). Multiple Timescales of Temporal Context in Risky Choice: Behavioral Identification and Relationships to Physiological Arousal. PLoS ONE, 19(1), e0296681. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296681

Publication Title

PLoS One

Volume

19

Issue

1

First Page

e0296681

ISSN

1932-6203

PubMed ID

38241251

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