Why some memories are prioritized over others, why memory loss sometimes leads to impaired decision-making, and why decisions are shaped by regret and counterfactual thinking

What Are Memories For? The Hippocampus Bridges Past Experience with Future Decisions. Natalie Biderman, Akram Bakkour, Daphna Shohamy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, June 5 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.04.004

Highlights
.  Memory plays a pervasive role in flexible decision-making that depends on inference, generalization, and deliberation.

.  This function of memory in decision-making is supported by the hippocampus, suggesting that the role of the hippocampus may be to create a record of the past in the service of future behavior.

.  This view reconciles findings from the fields of memory and decision-making. It offers new insight into why some memories are prioritized over others, why memory loss sometimes leads to impaired decision-making, and why decisions are shaped by regret and counterfactual thinking.

Abstract: Many decisions require flexible reasoning that depends on inference, generalization, and deliberation. Here, we review emerging findings indicating that the hippocampus, known for its role in long-term memory, contributes to these flexible aspects of value-based decision-making. This work offers new insights into the role of memory in decision-making and suggests that memory may shape decisions even in situations that do not appear, at first glance, to depend on memory at all. Uncovering the pervasive role of memory in decision-making challenges the way we define what memory is and what it does, suggesting that memory’s primary purpose may be to guide future behavior and that storing a record of the past is just one way to do so.

Keywords: memorydecision-makingamnesiahippocampusvalue