{"pk":28394,"title":"Navigating uncertainty through information search","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Selecting informative queries is a crucial component of learning and decision-making, where models of information searchhave been widely used to provide normative guidance. Yet a typical requirement of these models is complete informationabout the underlying probabilistic structure of the environment, which is seldom met in real-world situations. Thus,information search models are blind to the epistemic uncertainty that comes with learning through experience, and do notdistinguish between probabilities estimated from a sample of two and a sample of one million. We develop a learningparadigm where a successful strategy needs to balance the exploration of queries with high epistemic uncertainty, with theexploitation of queries already known to be useful. We show that a Bayesian sampling variant of traditional informationsearch models learns faster and performs better, but most surprisingly, that a simple take-the-difference heuristic (TTD)performs competitively using only the absolute difference between observed frequencies.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Abstracts-Posters","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6j7732td","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Charley","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Wu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Human Development","department":""},{"first_name":"Bjoern","middle_name":"","last_name":"Meder","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Human Development","department":""},{"first_name":"Jonathan","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Nelson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Surrey","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28394/galley/18160/download/"}]}