Win-switches in suicide attempters: value of chosen option as a function of preceding reward and stay/switch.
Legend: Estimated marginal means from a linear mixed-effects model predicting the expected value of participant’s choice based on whether the previous choice was rewarded and repeated (stay [filled circles]/switch [open circles]). The black vertical line indicates the expected value of a random choice given that it is a win-switch (mean of the second-best and worst options). Exploratory choices lie near or to the left of this line. The value of suicide attemtpers’ win-switch choices (black arrows) is consistently higher than chance, suggesting that they favor the second-best over the under-sampled worst option. NB: these statistics should be taken with caution since RL models were fitted to the same choices, shown for illustration.