# Investigating the neural systems supporting memory-based decision-making

> **NIH NIH F32** · BROWN UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $67,446

## Abstract

Project summary
 Structured world knowledge plays a central role during decision-making in many
settings. For example, when choosing ingredients for a sandwich, most people with reasonable
experience eating this kind of food are able to make choices that will increase the expected
value of the final product. This kind of decision relies on schema-level information about the
value of items in this context that has been abstracted over multiple experiences over the
course of a lifetime. In contrast, other decisions rely on value information that was learned
during a particular episodic experience: For example, remembering the pleasant taste of a
particular sandwich topping from last week. Despite the centrality of these kinds of choice
problems in real life, little is known about the neural systems involved in sampling and
evaluating such information during decision-making. These different forms of memory depend
on distinct regions of the brain, and damage or pathology within these areas could relate to
specific forms of decision-making impairment in neurodegenerative disease. The aim of this
proposal is to test the involvement of different neural systems in sampling schematic and
episodic memory in support value-based decision-making. I hypothesize that two partially
overlapping neural systems support sampling memory for value information, and describe two
functional neuroimaging experiments that test this hypothesis. The first experiment tests the
functional contributions of a few key brain regions in sampling episodic and schematic memory
for value information. By explicitly crossing the need for schema-level information and
expected value, this experiment can disentangle the involvement of different brain areas in
these processes. The second experiment will use representational similarity analysis to test
how the brain organizes different categories of stimuli based on their expected value in
different contexts. This experiment will examine how such contextual information is used to
dynamically determine the values of stimuli. These experiments test key questions at the
understudied intersection of value-based decision-making and declarative memory. My hope is
that this research will shed new light on the interaction of memory and decision-making
systems that may given insight into how decisions are made in ecological settings, with
meaningful translational implications to understanding the role of memory impairments in
decision behavior.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9988263
- **Project number:** 5F32MH116592-03
- **Recipient organization:** BROWN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Avinash Rao Vaidya
- **Activity code:** F32 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $67,446
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-08-01 → 2021-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9988263

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9988263, Investigating the neural systems supporting memory-based decision-making (5F32MH116592-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9988263. Licensed CC0.

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