Seminar – Shauna PARKES

Contextual Control of Choice

Choice behaviour is strongly influenced by context. In associative learning research, contexts are often defined as the stable environmental cues surrounding a learning experience, which can modulate which actions are selected or which outcomes are expected. More broadly, however, context may also refer to the “learning context” in which options are encountered and evaluated. In this view, the value of an option depends not only on its objective properties, but also on the alternatives with which it is compared.

In her talk, Shauna Parkes will present recent work examining how comparative learning contexts influence decision-making in rats and humans. Using parallel probabilistic learning tasks across species, her research group found robust evidence for relative value encoding: during transfer tests involving novel choice combinations, preferences frequently reflected the previously learned value of an option relative to its original alternatives, rather than its objective reward probability alone.

Evidence that these contextual valuation effects generalise across reward dimensions will also be provided. In rats, similar relative value biases were observed when options differed in reward quality, indexed by sucrose concentration. in addition, options learned in poorer choice contexts were often preferred over objectively equivalent alternatives learned in richer contexts.

Together, these findings suggest that comparative evaluation constitutes a powerful form of contextual control over choice behaviour across species.