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People Adjust Recency Adaptively to Environment Structure

Recency effects—giving exaggerated importance to recent outcomes—are a common aspect of decision tasks. In the current study, we explore two explanations of recency-based decision making, that it is (1) a deliberate strategy for adaptive decision making in real-world environments which tend to be dynamic and autocorrelated, and/or (2) a product of processing limitations of working memory. Supporting explanation 1, we found that participants strategically adjusted their recency levels across trials to achieve optimal levels in a range of tasks. Furthermore, they started with default recency values that had high aggregate performance across environments. However, only some correlations between recency values and WM scores were significant, providing no clear conclusion regarding explanation 2. Ultimately, we propose that recency involves a combination of the two—people can strategically change recency within the limits of WM capacities to adapt to external environments.