The Role of First Impression in Operant Learning

Hanan Shteingart, Tal Neiman and Yonatan Loewenstein

Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract: We quantified the effect of first experience on behavior in operant learning and studied its underlying computational principles. To that goal, we analyzed more than 200,000 choices in a repeated-choice experiment. We found that the outcome of the first experience has a substantial and lasting effect on participants' subsequent behavior, which we term outcome primacy. We found that this outcome primacy can account for much of the underweighting of rare events, where participants apparently underestimate small probabilities. We modeled behavior in this task using a standard, model-free reinforcement learning algorithm. In this model, the values of the different actions are learned over time and are used to determine the next action according to a predefined action-selection rule. We used a novel non-parametric method to characterize this action-selection rule and showed that the substantial effect of first experience on behavior is consistent with the reinforcement learning model if we assume that the outcome of first experience resets the values of the experienced actions, but not if we assume arbitrary initial conditions. Moreover, the predictive power of our resetting model outperforms previously published models regarding the aggregate choice behavior. These findings suggest that first experience has a disproportionately large effect on subsequent actions, similar to primacy effects in other fields of cognitive psychology. The mechanism of resetting of the initial conditions which underlies outcome primacy may thus also account for other forms of primacy.

Keywords: reinforcement learning; operant conditioning; underweighting of rare events; risk aversion; primacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2012-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp626.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp626.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp626.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:huj:dispap:dp626

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Simkin ().