Brain Meeting: Dr. Janina Hoffmann

Making adequate every-day decisions often demands recollecting past experiences from memory, integrating these experiences with novel information, and identifying which aspects are important for the decision problem at hand. Decision science portrays this process as a selection between two kinds of judgment or decision strategies: a capacity-limited abstraction of knowledge and a similarity-based retrieval of past instances. Disentangling those two strategies, past research has converged towards the view that knowledge abstraction relies more upon integrating information in working memory, whereas similarity-based retrieval draws more heavily upon episodic long-term memory. However, it remains an open question how individuals combine decisions from both strategies. Specifically, individuals may either integrate (or blend) knowledge abstraction with previously stored memories for each judgment they make, or they may select among different strategies. Drawing upon a learning approach, I aim to disentangle these strategy selection mechanisms. Evidence based on judgments and familiarity-based choices points towards the view that people rather integrate knowledge from several strategies than switch among the strategies, using memory as a guide to adjust their relative contribution.

Please contact ion.fil.brainmeetings@ucl.ac.uk for a Zoom link.