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Human Exploration Strategically Balances Approaching and Avoiding Uncertainty

Abir, Yaniv; Shadlen, Michael; Shohamy, Daphna; (2024) Human Exploration Strategically Balances Approaching and Avoiding Uncertainty. eLife 10.7554/eLife.94231.1. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

A central purpose of exploration is to reduce goal-relevant uncertainty. Consequentially, individuals often explore by focusing on areas of uncertainty in the environment. However, people sometimes adopt the opposite strategy, one of avoiding uncertainty. How are the conflicting tendencies to approach and avoid uncertainty reconciled in human exploration? We hypothesized that the balance between avoiding and approaching uncertainty can be understood by considering capacity constraints. Accordingly, people are expected to approach uncertainty in most cases, but to avoid it when overall uncertainty is highest. To test this, we developed a new task and used modeling to compare human choices to a range of plausible policies. The task required participants to learn the statistics of a simulated environment by active exploration. On each trial, participants chose to explore a better-known or lesser-known option. Participants generally chose to approach uncertainty, however, when overall uncertainty about the choice options was highest, they instead avoided uncertainty and chose to sample better-known objects. This strategy was associated with faster decisions and, despite reducing the rate of observed information, it did not impair learning. We suggest that balancing approaching and avoiding uncertainty reduces the cognitive costs of exploration in a resource-rational manner.

Type: Article
Title: Human Exploration Strategically Balances Approaching and Avoiding Uncertainty
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.94231.1
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.94231.1
Language: English
Additional information: This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Imaging Neuroscience
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10194871
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