Human development is often described as a “cooling off” process, analogous to stochastic optimization algorithms that implement a gradual reduction in randomness over time. Yet there is ambiguity in how to interpret this analogy, due to a lack of …
How do people actively learn functional rules, i.e. a mapping of continuous inputs onto a continuous output? We investigate information search behavior in a multiple-feature function learning task in which participants either actively select or …
How do children and adults search for information when stepwise-optimal strategies fail to identify the most efficient query? The value of questions is often measured in terms of stepwise information gain (expected reduction of entropy on the next …
How do children and adults differ in their search for rewards? We considered three different hypotheses that attribute developmental differences to (a) children's increased random sampling, (b) more directed exploration toward uncertain options, or …
How do people actively explore to learn about functional relationships, that is, how continuous inputs map onto continuous outputs? We introduce a novel paradigm to investigate information search in continuous, multi-feature function learning …
The idea of a "cognitive map" was originally developed to explain planning and generalization in spatial domains through a representation of inferred relationships between experiences. Recently, new research has suggested similar principles may also …
From foraging for food to learning complex games, many aspects of human behaviour can be framed as a search problem with a vast space of possible actions. Under finite search horizons, optimal solutions are generally unobtainable. Yet, how do humans …
Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the patient might have. In a probabilistic framework, test selection is …
How should tests (or queries, questions, or experiments) be selected? Does it matter if only a single test is allowed, or if a sequential test strategy can be planned in advance? This article contributes two sets of theoretical results bearing on …
While the influence of presentation formats have been widely studied in Bayesian reasoning tasks, we present the first systematic investigation of how presentation formats influence information search decisions. Four experiments were conducted across …