{"pk":26365,"title":"Information-Seeking, Learning and the Marginal Value Theorem:\nA Normative Approach to Adaptive Exploration","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Daily life often makes us decide between two goals:\nmaximizing immediate rewards (exploitation) and learning\nabout the environment so as to improve our options for future\nrewards (exploration). An adaptive organism therefore should\nplace value on information independent of immediate reward,\nand affective states may signal such value (e.g., curiosity vs.\nboredom: Hill & Perkins, 1985; Eastwood et al. 2012). This\ntradeoff has been well studied in “bandit” tasks involving\nchoice among a fixed number of options, but is equally\npertinent in situations such as foraging, hunting, or job search,\nwhere one encounters a series of new options sequentially.\nHere, we augment the classic serial foraging scenario to more\nexplicitly reward the development of knowledge. We develop\na formal model that quantifies the value of information in this\nsetting and how it should impact decision making, paralleling\nthe treatment of reward by the marginal value theorem (MVT)\nin the foraging literature. We then present the results of an\nexperiment designed to provide an initial test of this model,\nand discuss the implications of this information-foraging\nframework on boredom and task disengagement.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Exploration"},{"word":"explore-exploit tradeoff"},{"word":"information-seeking"},{"word":"decision making."}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5339f64z","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Andra","middle_name":"","last_name":"Geana","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Wilson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Arizona","department":""},{"first_name":"Nathaniel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Daw","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""},{"first_name":"Jonathan","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Cohen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Princeton University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26365/galley/16001/download/"}]}