The experimental investigation of decision-making in humans relies on two distinct types of paradigms, involving either description- or experience-based choices. In description-based paradigms decision variables (i.e., payoffs and probabilities) are explicitly communicated by mean of symbols. In experience-based paradigms decision variables are learnt from trial-by-trial feedback. In the decision-making literature ‘description-experience gap’ refers to the fact that different biases are observed in the two experimental paradigms. Remarkably, well-documented biases of description-based choices, such as under-weighting of rare events and loss aversion, do not apply to experience-based decisions. Here we argue that the description-experience gap represents a major challenge, not only to current decision theories, but also to the neuroeconomics research framework, which reliesheavily on the translation of neurophysiological findings between human and non-human primate research. In fact, most non-human primate neurophysiological research relies on behavioural designs that share features of both description and experience-based choices. As a consequence, it is unclear whether the neural mechanisms discovered in non-human primate electrophysiology should be linked to description-based or experience-based decision-making processes. The picture is further complicated by additional methodological gaps between human and non-human primate neural research. After analysing these methodological challenges, we conclude proposing new lines of research to address them.
The description-experience gap: a challenge for the neuroeconomics of decision-making under uncertainty
