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Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Not all uncertainty promotes exploration

Fukun Evelene Zhang¹, Payam Piray¹; ¹University of Southern California

Presenter: Fukun Evelene Zhang

Adaptive decision-making requires balancing the exploitation of known outcomes with the exploration of uncertain alternatives. Although uncertainty is often thought to promote exploration, different sources of uncertainty may have opposing effects. Volatility, or change in latent causes, increases the value of new information, wheres stochasticity, moment-to-moment outcome variability, may reduce it, both increase total uncertainty but require opposing adjustments to learning. Using simulations and three human experiments, we show that optimal agents and humans explore more under volatility but less under stochasticity, even though stochasticity increases total uncertainty. These findings challenge the view that uncertainty uniformly promotes exploration, demonstrating instead that exploration depends critically on the source of uncertainty, paralleling its opposing effects on learning.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition