The information gain of explicitly provided over self-generated contextual knowledge for behavioral control.

ABSTRACT: In time-pressured decisions, humans exploit contextual knowledge to reduce uncertainty about the unfolding situation and to improve behavioral control. However, in complex real-world settings, it remains unclear whether the explicit provision of contextual information is beneficial or not. We thus examined the information gain of explicitly provided information as a function of expertise, information uncertainty and acquisition phase. To this end, we measured the positioning of female handball players (N = 36 experts + 36 near-experts) in a virtual-reality defensive task as a function of their teammates' defensive-strength patterns, which was either explicitly instructed or had to be self-generated. Furthermore, the certainty of provided information was experimentally varied (67% vs. 83% c

SUBMITTER: Magnaguagno L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11805413 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature