The role of uncertainty in attentional and choice exploration

Walker, Adrian and Luque, David and Le Pelley, Mike E. and Beesley, Tom (2019) The role of uncertainty in attentional and choice exploration. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 26 (6). 1911–1916. ISSN 1069-9384

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Abstract

The exploitation-exploration (EE) trade-off describes how, when making a decision, an organism must often choose between a safe alternative with a known pay-off, and one or more riskier alternatives with uncertain pay-offs. Recently, the concept of the EE trade-off has been extended to the examination of how organisms distribute limited attentional resources between several stimuli. This work suggests that when the rules governing the environment are certain, participants learn to “exploit” by attending preferentially to cues that provide the most information about upcoming events. However, when the rules are uncertain, people “explore” by increasing their attention to all cues that may provide information to help in predicting upcoming events. In the current study, we examine how uncertainty affects the EE trade-off in attention using a contextual two-armed bandit task, where participants explore with both their attention and their choice behavior. We find evidence for an influence of uncertainty on the EE trade-off in both choice and attention. These findings provide support for the idea of an EE trade-off in attention, and that uncertainty is a primary motivator for exploration in both choice and attentional allocation.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
Additional Information:
The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01653-2
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3200/3205
Subjects:
?? attentionhuman associative learningexplorationuncertaintyexperimental and cognitive psychology ??
ID Code:
135875
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
29 Jul 2019 10:40
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
19 Mar 2024 00:40