Where Questions Come From: Reusing Old Questions in New Situations

Emily G. Liquin, Todd M. Gureckis

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Question asking is a powerful means by which humans learn. However, asking a question requires searching through a massive space of possible questions to find a single question that is relevant and informative. How do humans efficiently accomplish this task? Drawing on prior research on other decision problems, we propose that the search for new questions is constrained by those encountered in the past, so that people frequently reuse questions (or parts of questions) rather than generating new questions “from scratch.” We find empirical support for this prediction, and we find that this “question reuse” has consequences for the informational value of people's questions. Taken together, this research sheds new light on the mechanisms behind human question asking abilities and, more generally, how we narrow down a large space of possibilities to find a single solution.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages1160-1167
Number of pages8
StatePublished - 2022
Event44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: Jul 27 2022Jul 30 2022

Conference

Conference44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period7/27/227/30/22

Keywords

  • active learning
  • expected information gain
  • information search
  • question asking

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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