Intrinsic Valuation of Information in Decision Making under Uncertainty.

ABSTRACT: In a dynamic world, an accurate model of the environment is vital for survival, and agents ought regularly to seek out new information with which to update their world models. This aspect of behaviour is not captured well by classical theories of decision making, and the cognitive mechanisms of information seeking are poorly understood. In particular, it is not known whether information is valued only for its instrumental use, or whether humans also assign it a non-instrumental intrinsic value. To address this question, the present study assessed preference for non-instrumental information among 80 healthy participants in two experiments. Participants performed a novel information preference task in which they could choose to pay a monetary cost to receive advance information about the out

SUBMITTER: Bennett D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4944922 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature