Multiple timescales of temporal context in risky choice : Behavioral identification and relationships to physiological arousal

Copyright: © 2024 Brooks, Sokol-Hessner. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited..

Context-dependence is fundamental to risky monetary decision-making. A growing body of evidence suggests that temporal context, or recent events, alters risk-taking at a minimum of three timescales: immediate (e.g. trial-by-trial), neighborhood (e.g. a group of consecutive trials), and global (e.g. task-level). To examine context effects, we created a novel monetary choice set with intentional temporal structure in which option values shifted between multiple levels of value magnitude ("contexts") several times over the course of the task. This structure allowed us to examine whether effects of each timescale were simultaneously present in risky choice behavior and the potential mechanistic role of arousal, an established correlate of risk-taking, in context-dependency. We found that risk-taking was sensitive to immediate, neighborhood, and global timescales: risk-taking decreased following large (vs. small) outcome amounts, increased following large positive (but not negative) shifts in context, and increased when cumulative earnings exceeded expectations. We quantified arousal with skin conductance responses, which were related to the global timescale, increasing with cumulative earnings, suggesting that physiological arousal captures a task-level assessment of performance. Our results both replicate and extend prior research by demonstrating that risky decision-making is consistently dynamic at multiple timescales and that the role of arousal in risk-taking extends to some, but not all timescales of context-dependence.

Medienart:

E-Artikel

Erscheinungsjahr:

2024

Erschienen:

2024

Enthalten in:

Zur Gesamtaufnahme - volume:19

Enthalten in:

PloS one - 19(2024), 1 vom: 31., Seite e0296681

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Brooks, Hayley R [VerfasserIn]
Sokol-Hessner, Peter [VerfasserIn]

Links:

Volltext

Themen:

Journal Article

Anmerkungen:

Date Completed 22.01.2024

Date Revised 22.01.2024

published: Electronic-eCollection

Citation Status MEDLINE

doi:

10.1371/journal.pone.0296681

funding:

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

NLM36731746X