New publication in the „Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience'“
20 March 2023, by Celestina Hermida da Costa
Peter M. Kraemer and Sebastian Gluth published the article "Episodic Memory Retrieval Affects the Onset and Dynamics of Evidence Accumulation during Value-based Decisions" in the 'Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience'.
Many everyday decisions are made in the physical absence of the considered goods, requiring agents to recall information about the goods from memory. In the article, the authors ask whether and how this reliance on an internal memory representation affects the temporal dynamics of decision making on a cognitive and neural levels. Participants performed a memory-and-decide task in which they made simple purchasing decisions between money offers and snack items while undergoing EEG. Snack identity was presented either visually (value trials) or had to be recalled from memory (memory trials). The results of the study show that both decision and nondecision processes are prolonged when participants need to resort to internal memory representations during value-based decisions.