For some people, everyday sights and sounds quietly hijack decision-making—and refuse to let go.
People naturally learn to connect what they see and hear with what happens next. Over time, visual and sound cues in the environment can signal whether a choice is likely to lead to a good or bad outcome, and the brain begins to use those cues as shortcuts for decision making. For individuals with compulsive disorders, addictions, or anxiety, these learned connections can become distorted. Instead of helping, they may push people toward poor choices as they grow overly drawn to certain cues or work too hard to avoid others.
To better understand this process, Giuseppe di Pellegrino of the University of Bologna led a study examining how people learn from cues and how this learning can contribute to harmful decision patterns.
When Cues Become Hard to Unlearn
Reporting their findings in a JNeurosci paper, the researchers found that not everyone relies on environmental cues in the same way. Some people depend on surrounding sights and sounds much more heavily when making decisions. These individuals also tend to struggle when conditions change. When familiar cues start signaling riskier outcomes, they may have difficulty updating their beliefs and letting go of old associations.
As a result, their decision making can remain biased even when it consistently leads to worse outcomes. This tendency can cause disadvantageous choices to persist over time rather than adjusting to new information.
Why Some Decision Patterns Persist
According to the researchers, the findings suggest that certain people are more sensitive to cues and less flexible when it comes to revising what those cues mean. This combination may help explain why harmful decision patterns are so difficult to break.
The team plans to continue studying associative learning in patient populations to better understand whether the kinds of persistent decision problems seen in addictions, compulsive disorders, and anxiety are more common among people who are especially influenced by the visuals and sounds that shape their choices, which characterize addictions, compulsive disorders, and anxiety.
Reference: “Reduced Pavlovian value updating alters decision-making in sign-trackers” by Luigi A.E. Degni, Lorenzo Mattioni, Claudio Danti, Valentina Bernardi, Gianluca Finotti, Marco Badioli, Francesca Starita, Alireza Soltani, Giuseppe di Pellegrino and Sara Garofalo, 21 December 2025, Journal of Neuroscience.
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1465-25.2025
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1 Comment
Decision-making interference by data manipulation by commercial production of useful noise and distraction. Click-bait and other means to upset the conscious activity and produce anxiety in order to produce the urge to buy something in order to alleviate the upset, or to find a sweet substance to eat. Overweight, sleepiness, inactivity and video binge-watching. And, just to mention, loud and louder truck and traffic noise, all the clanging and banging that folks have seemingly become used to, without thinking. Hmmm….”thinking.” what about the means to “quiet” the thinking process. Irritability and the fight-or-fight response; inflammatory effects on the body and psyche.