The Role of Familiarity and Recollection in Value-Based Decisions

Value-based decisions often require retrieving previous experiences from memory. A sense of familiarity, the subjective feeling of having encountered an option before, guides these search and decision processes. The current work explores the scope and boundaries of familiarity-based retrieval in predicting value-based decisions. To reach this goal, we formulate a familiarity-based decision making model (FB-DMM) that relies upon global matching of the current options to previously seen choice options within the current context. FB-DMM predicts that people prefer frequently encountered options to less frequent ones and explains why familiarity elicits preferences for high-value rather than low-value options. In Experiment 1, FB-DMM predicted participants' choices well when participants chose between option pairs with the same frequency of encounters, but different values. Against FB-DMM's prediction, participants rejected frequently repeated options with low values, indicating that individuals may have recollected the options' values instead. Experiment 2 aimed to diminish recollection-based processing by restricting decision times. Imposing time pressure reduced accuracy of participants' choices and slightly reduced decisions against familiar options with low values. A comparison of FB-DMM to a recollection-based model indicated that participants engaged less in recollection-based retrieval under time pressure. Taken together, our results suggest that familiarity-based matching processes capture a wider range of decision phenomena than suggested initially. Still, FB-DMM needs to be complemented by recollection-based processes to explain decisions going beyond the familiarity principle.