H. Stojic - Human approaches to solving exploration-exploitation problem through the lens of novelty and attention

Abstract

Exploration-exploitation dilemma is a key problem decision makers that navigate the real world have to tackle. Should you choose an option that you know and currently like best? Or should you be curious and try a more uncertain option in order to learn about it? Previous studies have shown mixed results on how humans approach solving this trade-off between reward and information. Some studies show that humans tend to explore in a random, undirected fashion, while others show some evidence that humans are more sophisticated, exploring in a directed manner. I will present two studies, what I hope to be a convincing evidence for humans as sophisticated decision makers, one through the lens of how humans deal with novel options and one through the lens of joint interactions between learning, decision making and attention. Both studies show that humans are learning about decision options by building probabilistic models, and then leverage uncertainty afforded by the probabilistic nature of learning when deciding between the options - a form of sophisticated directed exploration. In addition, novelty study shows that uncertainty-guided exploration plays a key role in explaining behaviour towards novel options, while the attention study exploited gaze allocation data to provide additional evidence for the uncertainty-guided exploration.

Website of Hrvoje Stojic, PhD

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