Feature-based valuation and its impairment in people with compulsive and addictive symptoms
Effective decision-making requires evaluating options based on relevant features while reducing attention to those that are not. However, how attention prioritizes one source of information over another during value-based decisions remains unknown. Across 7 experiments, we show that irrelevant features both constructively and destructively interfered with how values are assigned to choice…
Evaluating choices involves weighing relevant features, while ignoring those that are irrelevant. Yet, the way attention diverts focus between different kinds of information during value-based decisions is not well understood. In a series of seven studies, researchers found that irrelevant features could either help or hinder the assignment of values to options.
When relevant and irrelevant features aligned, decision-making was both faster and more accurate. However, when they disagreed, accuracy dropped and choices took longer, depending on how valuable the conflicting feature was. The researchers modeled this interference as a combined value of both relevant and irrelevant features. This model not only explained individual variations in decision-making but also correlated with the severity of psychiatric symptoms linked to substance abuse and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
These symptoms may, in part, indicate a diminished capacity to balance relevant and irrelevant information when judging the value of choices, a process the researchers refer to as feature-based valuation.
Written by urgent.news from bioRxiv's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
