Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Memory is a crucial component of everyday decision making, yet little is known about how memory and choice processesinteract, and whether or not established memory regularities persist during memory-based decision making. In this paper,we introduce a novel experimental paradigm to study the differences between memory processes at play in standard listrecall versus in preferential choice. Using computational memory models, fit to data from two pre-registered experiments,we find that some established memory regularities (primacy, recency, semantic clustering) emerge in preferential choice,whereas others (temporal clustering) are significantly weakened relative to standard list recall. Notably, decision-relevantfeatures, such as item desirability, play a stronger role in guiding retrieval in choice. Our results suggest memory processesdiffer across preferential choice and standard memory tasks, and that choice modulates memory by differentially activatingdecision-relevant features such as what we like.