Hunger altered experiential risk‐taking in a context‐specific manner
hunger [
REGRESSION
We first analyzed choice behavior in the low‐ and high‐reward context to evaluate experience‐based risk‐taking in a context‐specific manner (Figure Risk attitudes for learned and described risks. (a) For learned risks, participants were risk‐averse for low‐reward contexts and risk‐seeking for high‐reward contexts. Hunger attenuated risk attitudes for decision contexts in opposite direction. Data are presented with respect to chance level. (b) Proportion of high‐mean options chosen for mixed‐context trials in decisions from experience. (c) For described risks, participants were risk‐seeking for low‐reward contexts and risk‐averse for high‐reward contexts (gambles 9 and 10; Figure Although the interaction is significant at a group level, we further asked whether the effect is strong enough to be seen within individuals. For each participant, we ran a post hoc context × hunger logistic regression (Figure S2). Ten out of 32 people had effects that reached significance in the expected direction even within single participants. Only one person had a significant effect in the opposite direction. Finally, hunger did not alter overall risk‐taking behavior (main effect of hunger [To verify that neutral risk preferences were not caused by an inability to differentiate stimuli, we used mixed‐context trials to examine whether participants understood the difference in mean and variance of reward distributions. All participants performed on average above 90% on mixed‐context trials, and no participant performed below 60%, indicating that they understood the distinction between high‐ and low‐mean stimuli. The level of hunger did not affect the accuracy on mixed‐context trials (Finally, the observed changes in risk preferences following hunger were not the result of changes in attention, as the overall reaction times were consistent across conditions (main effect of hunger [