{"pk":27461,"title":"Information Seeking as Chasing Anticipated Prediction Errors","subtitle":null,"abstract":"When faced with delayed, uncertain rewards, humans andother animals usually prefer to know the eventual outcomesin advance. This preference for cues providing advance infor-mation can lead to seemingly suboptimal choices, where lessreward is preferred over more reward. Here, we introduce areinforcement-learning model of this behavior, the anticipatedprediction error (APE) model, based on the idea that predic-tion errors themselves can be rewarding. As a result, animalswill sometimes pick options that yield large prediction errors,even when the expected rewards are smaller. We compare theAPE model against an alternative information-bonus model,where information itself is viewed as rewarding. These mod-els are evaluated against a newly collected dataset with humanparticipants. The APE model fits the data as well or betterthan the other models, with fewer free parameters, thus provid-ing a more robust and parsimonious account of the suboptimalchoices. These results suggest that anticipated prediction er-rors can be an important signal underpinning decision making.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"information seeking; early resolution of uncer-tainty; anticipated prediction errors; forward sampling."}],"section":"Posters: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11k5w5dg","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jian-Qiao","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Warwick","department":""},{"first_name":"Wendi","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xiang","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Warwick","department":""},{"first_name":"Elliot","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Ludvig","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Warwick","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27461/galley/17097/download/"}]}