Reactivation of reward-related patterns from single past episodes supports memory-based decision making
Rewarding experiences exert a strong influence on later decision making. While decades of neuroscience research have shown how reinforcement gradually shapes preferences, decisions are often influenced by single past experiences. Surprisingly, relatively little is known about the influence of single learning episodes. While recent work has proposed a role for episodes in decision making, it is largely unknown whether and how episodic experiences contribute to value-based decision making and how the values of single episodes are represented in the brain. In multiple behavioral experiments and an fMRI experiment, we tested whether and how rewarding episodes could support later decision making. Participants experienced episodes of high reward or low reward in conjunction with incidental, trial-unique neutral pictures. In a surprise test phase, we found that participants could indeed remember the associated level of reward, as evidenced by accurate source memory for value and preferences to re-engage with rewarded objects. Further, in a separate experiment, we found that high reward objects shown as primes before a gambling task increased financial risk-taking. Neurally, re-exposure to objects in the test phase led to significant reactivation of reward-related patterns. Importantly, individual variability in the strength of reactivation predicted value memory performance. Further, local searchlight analyses identified significant reactivation in the ventromedial PFC. Our results provide a novel demonstration that affect-related neural patterns are reactivated during later experience. Reactivation of value information represents a mechanism by which memory can guide decision making.