Memory-Based Representations of Experience in Decision Making under Uncertainty

How do people represent past experiences under uncertainty, and how do these representations guide learning, judgment, and decision making? My research investigates how people build mental representations of uncertain environments from experience and how these representations shape preferences and risk perception. Across behavioral experiments and computational modeling, I examine how people encode collections of past experiences in memory, when they form precise versus gist-like representations, and how these representations support flexible use of their experiences. This work reveals that people rarely learn or recall full probability distributions; instead, they construct simplified yet adaptive representations that emphasise the most informative or extreme features of what they have encountered. Applying this framework to climate change, I explore how prior beliefs influence the general public’s and climate scientists interpretation of climate projections. Together, this research sheds light on how memory and experience shape learning and decision making under uncertainty.
 

The nEuro-economics seminar is a monthly seminar series organised by the HRL team. We invite Europe-based early career researchers to speak about their research at the crossroads of neuroscience, psychology and economics. 

Program