According to normative decision-making theories, the composition of a choice setshould not affect people’s preferences regarding the different options.This assumption contrasts with decades of research that have identified multiplesituations in which this principle is violated, leading to context effects.Recently, research on context effects has been extended to the domain ofexperience-based choices, where it has been shown that forgone outcomes fromirrelevant alternatives affect preferences — an accentuation effect. Morespecifically, it has been shown that an option presented in a situation in whichits outcomes are salient across several trials is evaluated more positively thanin a context in which its outcomes are less salient. In the present study, weinvestigated whether irrelevant information affects preferences as much asrelevant information. In two experiments, individuals completed a learning taskwith partial feedback. We found that past outcomes from non-chosen options,which contain no relevant information at all, led to the same accentuationeffect as did counterfactual outcomes that provided new and relevantinformation. However, if the information is entirely irrelevant (from optionsthat could not have been chosen), individuals ignored it, thus ruling out apurely perceptual account of the accentuation effect. These results providefurther support for the influence of salience on learning and highlight thenecessity of mechanistic accounts in decision-making research.