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Poster F in Poster Session F: Thursday, August 6, 1:45 – 3:30 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Rule learning distorts memory for pre-learning decisions

Keishiro Sawa¹, Sanjay Manohar¹, Tobias Gerstenberg², Matan Mazor¹; ¹University of Oxford, ²Stanford University

Presenter: Matan Mazor

Remembering one's past decisions is critical for learning from delayed feedback and maintaining an accurate self-model. Across two gamified experiments, we find that learning a hidden rule leads to worse memory for one’s decisions made prior to rule learning, producing a trade-off between learning and memory. We suggest that this reveals an important principle: when reconstructing past decisions, people use their current behavioural policy as a model for how they behaved in the past.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures