Anticipation and Choice Heuristics in the Dynamic Consumption of Pain Relief
Figure 8
Fits of the anticipation-discounting model with variable utility and choice randomness.
A The observed distribution of consumption at the group level by participants for whom anticipation-discounting functions derived one-off choice tasks were available (N = 23). Warmer colors indicate that a higher proportion of participants chose to consume that amount of relief on a particular trial. B Group-Level distribution of relief consumption predicted by the optimal model and modifications to it. These plots denote the mean probability across all participants of consuming an amount of relief, ct, on each trial, t, given a vector of the total remaining relief for each participant on each trial, st, st+1, st+2, … sT, at the maximum likelihood parameters, θ, of each model. i) Anticipation-discounting functions derived from one-off pain frame choices, with the softmax temperature, beta, and utility parameters freely fitted. ii) Anticipation-discounting functions derived from one-off relief frame choices, with the softmax temperature, beta, and utility parameters freely fitted. C The proportion of variance explained by each model. Mean predicted consumption levels simulated from the maximum likelihood parameterizations of each model over each 10 trials of the experiment for each participant are plotted against the same metric derived from the observed data.