Humans generally try to make good decisions. Sometimes, these decisions are based on experience, but sometimes we have to rely on abstract information because we have not experienced the long-term consequences of a decision before. For example, many people try to avoid fast-food, yet not because they have experienced weight-gain after eating, but because of information provided about its negative long-term consequences. In a recent study published in Nature Communications, Fischer and Ullsperger from the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg and Bourgeois- Gironde from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris demonstrate that short-term reward experience biases our estimates of what is good or bad in the long-term – despite knowing that these short-term experiences are irrelevant to the long-term outcome. A positive experience, for example the taste of fast-food, makes us believe that this decision is better even on the long-term, despite knowing that this is not the case. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers additionally found out that that short-term experience and long-term information are processed in separate regions of the human brain. However, they found overlapping processing in the medial striatum , an evolutionary old structure that controls and selects actions, and the frontal cortex, a brain region closely associated with higher cognitive functions and behavioural control. Surprisingly, especially participants of the study that were best able to estimate the true long-term consequences of decisions, showed a stronger influence of short-term experiences on the activity of control regions in the brain and those regions that showed overlapping activity. This suggests that in order to make optimal decisions in the long-term, it is better to intensively reflect upon one's own immediate rewarding experiences rather than trying to ignore them. 

 

• Adrian G. Fischer , Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde & Markus Ullsperger (2017) Short-term reward experience biases inference despite dissociable neural correlates, Nature Communication, 1690, doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01703-0
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