A preference for the unpredictable over the informative during self-directed learning

Doug Markant	Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Todd Gureckis	New York University

Abstract

The potential information gained from asking a question and one’s uncertainty about the answer to that question are not always the same. For example, given a coin that one believes to be fair, the uncertainty a person has about the outcome of flipping that coin is high, but either outcome is unlikely to make them believe that the coin is biased (i.e., the “information gain” of that observation is low). In the present paper we show that people use a simple form of predictive uncertainty to guide their information sampling decisions, a strategy which is often equivalent to maximizing information gain, but is less efficient in environments where potential queries vary in their reliability. We conclude that a potentially powerful driver of human information gathering may be the inability to predict what will happen as a result of an action or query.

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A preference for the unpredictable over the informative during self-directed learning (1.9 MB)