The “construction” view of preference holds that we sample information from memory in the moment to make judgments and decisions. Building on previous work examining the relationship between memory performance and judgment, we used incentive-compatible methods to investigate both the extent to which memory supports evaluation and the potential trade-off between online and memory-based retrospective evaluation. In a series of pre-registered experiments, we presented people with a sequence of numerical values and asked them to complete either a free recall task, a willingness to-pay (WTP) task, or both. Using Bayesian mixed effects modeling, we predicted WTP (for the values in the remembered sequence) from both recalled items and presented items, and examined how the position of a value in a sequence determined its contribution to overall evaluation. Uniquely, we compared models of overall performance in memory across trials (e.g., primacy and recency) with those that predict evaluation from specific items recalled on individual trials. Previous studies are likely to have underestimated the strength of the relationship by focusing only on general trends in memory performances. Our findings indicated that memory predicts evaluation when examined at the level of individual people and individual sequences. We replicate the findings that when participants anticipate a judgment task, they show less accurate recall from memory and show a preference for online updating. We demonstrated that even under these conditions, relying on memory is an effective strategy for performing evaluation, and discuss implications for understanding how people resolve the trade-off between online and retrospective evaluation.
Subjective value and decision entropy are jointly encoded by aligned gradients across the human brain
