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Poster A in Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 4, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Timing of Guidance Shapes Experiential Learning

Divya Srinivasan¹, Ellen Su¹, Mark K Ho¹, Todd M. Gureckis¹; ¹New York University

Presenter: Divya Srinivasan

People effortlessly integrate guidance from others into their direct learning experiences. In this study, we investigate how the time at which this guidance is provided, in the form of a hint, shapes learning in multi-armed bandit tasks. Across two task types (stationary and patch-foraging), we show that hints delivered earlier generally produce larger performance gains, though this pattern varies with task structure. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model that incorporates hint timing and show that it captures key patterns in human choice behavior. Our results suggest that the value of linguistic guidance depends jointly on its content and on how much prior experience a learner has already accumulated.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures