Influence of previous choice and outcome in a two-alternative decision-making task

Abstract

In everyday life, we encounter many such situations in which we need to make decisions. A major gap in decision-making research so far is that decision- making paradigms are often limited to specific domains, such as perceptual, value-based, or social stimuli. We use two-alternative forced choice experiment as a unified paradigm to present different types of reinforcers – Numbers, shapes, money, and faces. We gave participants different probabilities of winning on twocards. Although the probabilities that varied between different blocks of trials were unknown, our results confirmed participants follow probability matching behavior. Our results show that the context of previous trial’s outcome (i.e. win or loss) modulated the staying and switching patterns and this effect was stronger for numbers choice task.