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 …
Gute Fragen zu stellen, ist eine grundlegende Kompetenz für das Lösen alltäglicher Aufgaben. Der vorliegende Beitrag skizziert eine spielerische Moglichkeit, anhand von gut überlegten Fragen zu verschiedenen Merkmalen und Fabelwesen erste Kenntnisse …
We introduce the spatially correlated multi-armed bandit as a task coupling function learning with the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Participants interacted with bi-variate reward functions on a two-dimensional grid, with the goal of either …
How can heuristic strategies emerge from smaller building blocks? We propose Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) as a computational solution to this problem. As a first proof of concept, we demonstrate how a heuristic decision strategy such as …
We investigated 4th-grade children's search strategies on sequential search tasks in which the goal is to identify an unknown target object by asking yes-no questions about its features. We used exhaustive search to identify the most efficient …
The goal of obtaining information to improve classification accuracy can strongly conflict with the goal of obtaining information for improving payoffs. Two environments with such a conflict were identified through computer optimization. Three …