Alexander Paunov, Maëva L'Hôtellier, Dalin Guo, Zoe He, Angela Yu, Florent Meyniel
Decision-making in noisy, changing, and partially observable environments entails a basic tradeoff between immediate reward and longer-term information gain, known as the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Computationally, an effective way to balance this tradeoff is by leveraging uncertainty to guide exploration. Yet, in humans, empirical findings are mixed, from suggesting uncertainty-seeking to indifference and avoidance. In a novel bandit task that better captures uncertainty-driven behavior, we find multiple roles for uncertainty in human choices...
March 30, 2024: bioRxiv