Emotional information processing & decision-making

Do plausible futures and past experiences impact on decision making?

Are past experiences not directly retrieved in memory?

How (re) construction of past/future experiences may determine immediate emotions and decisions?

How people can learn from bodily signals in decision making?

As common sense and psychological research (e.g. Damasio, 1994) suggest, our decisions are based, at least in part, on plausible scenarios we are constructing. These plausible futures are themselves determined by our past experiences (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Not only do past experiences directly impact on the emotional state during decision making but past experiences also represent an important source of information to construct anticipations that will influence the immediate emotion and the decision process.

Decision making models tend to consider past experiences as a stored piece of information that is or is not being accessed (e.g., Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). However, contemporary work on autobiographical memory-i.e. the memory of our past experiences-demonstrated that a past experience is not directly accessed as such (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) but rather that its different aspects (e.g., episodic aspects, emotional aspects, etc.) are stored separately.

The voluntary retrieval of a past experience is therefore a reconstructive process, implying the activation and integration of different memories and requiring significant cognitive resources. An important contribution of this line of research has been to demonstrate that the very same processes and sources of autobiographical information are used to reconstruct past experiences as well as to construct representations of plausible future experiences (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Wheeler, Stuss & Tulving, 1997).

Research program I.1. will extend these recent findings to the field of decision making and investigate how different modes of (re-)construction of past and future experiences may determine immediate emotions and decisions.

Research program I.2. will be concerned with the way people can learn from bodily signals in the context of decision making. During the last decade, the work on the "somatic marker hypothesis" investigated how somatic information is shaping our decisions. This research leaves many questions unanswered. In particular, little attention has been paid to the role of personality factors.

Promoters associated to these programs are