@inproceedings{71ba32e7947544d198528e968403b831,
title = "The value of approaching bad things",
abstract = "Adaptive decision making often entails learning to approach things that lead to positive outcomes while avoiding things that are negative. The decision to avoid something removes the risk of a negative experience but also forgoes the opportunity to obtain information, specifically that a seemingly negative option is actually positive. This paper explores how people learn to approach or avoid objects with uncertain payoffs. We provide a computational-level analysis of optimal decision making in this problem which quantifies how the probability of encountering an object in the future should impact the decision to approach or avoid it. A large experiment conducted online shows that most people intuitively take into account both their uncertainty and the value of information when deciding to approach seemingly bad things.",
keywords = "approach-or-avoid behavior, decision making, sequential decision making, value of information",
author = "Rich, {Alexander S.} and Gureckis, {Todd M.}",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2014 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014. All rights reserved.; 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014 ; Conference date: 23-07-2014 Through 26-07-2014",
year = "2014",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014",
publisher = "The Cognitive Science Society",
pages = "1281--1286",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014",
}