Multiple and subject-specific roles of uncertainty in reward-guided decision-making.

ABSTRACT: Decision-making in noisy, changing, and partially observable environments entails a basic tradeoff between immediate reward and longer-term information gain, known as the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Computationally, an effective way to balance this tradeoff is by leveraging uncertainty to guide exploration. Yet, in humans, empirical findings are mixed, from suggesting uncertainty-seeking to indifference and avoidance. In a novel bandit task that better captures uncertainty-driven behavior, we find multiple roles for uncertainty in human choices. First, stable and psychologically meaningful individual differences in uncertainty preferences actually range from seeking to avoidance, which can manifest as null group-level effects. Second, uncertainty modulates the use of basic decision h

SUBMITTER: Paunov A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10996615 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature