{"pk":26555,"title":"Heuristics in exploration: Distributional information is selectively used for activelearning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Everyday decision-making is filled with choices about what to act on, with outcomes playing a critical role in learn-ing. Information gain is oft cited as a valuable approach to maximize potential learning, but its computation is costly. It entailsevaluating the probability of multiple outcomes given any possible action, and then considering the degree of belief-change overall possibilities. Given the computational complexity of this evaluation, it becomes important to ask whether learners employcues to information gain; are there heuristics that drive choice in active learning? Our experiments ask participants to choosebetween two options (varying in distributional characteristics) in either a “learning-condition” or “collecting-condition”. Ourresults suggest that adults are sensitive to cues (e.g. variance) that tend to correlate with information gain. These cues areonly favored in learning-goal contexts, suggesting that certain distributional qualities are not always appealing, but rather areselectively-employed heuristics towards information gain.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91m9h069","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lapidow","name_suffix":"","institution":"Rutgers University","department":""},{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bonawitz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Rutgers University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26555/galley/16191/download/"}]}