TY - GEN
T1 - The value of approaching bad things
AU - Rich, Alexander S.
AU - Gureckis, Todd M.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments. This work was supported by grant number BCS-1255538 from the National Science Foundation and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of the Interior (DOI) contract D10PC20023 to TMG.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014. All rights reserved.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - approach-or-avoid behavior
KW - decision making
KW - sequential decision making
KW - value of information
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85126734097
T3 - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
SP - 1281
EP - 1286
BT - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
Y2 - 23 July 2014 through 26 July 2014
ER -