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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Parallel biases in affective reactivity and learning from counterfactual feedback

Karen Chen¹, Kate Nussenbaum¹; ¹Boston University

Presenter: Karen Chen

To effectively navigate complex environments, people can learn from both the outcomes of their choices as well as from the counterfactual outcomes of alternative options. Attending to counterfactual feedback often improves subsequent decision making while also eliciting feelings of regret and relief, which in turn may further influence learning. Here, we present a novel task to measure how counterfactual feedback influences both affect and reinforcement learning strategies. Our initial results (N = 28) indicate that both the extent to which participants’ happiness is influenced by counterfactual feedback and the extent to which they learn from it are biased upwards, suggesting a potential relationship between feelings of regret and counterfactual learning strategies.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition