Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Exploration and Information Seeking Under Uncertainty

Abstract

Effective exploration and information-seeking are crucial to reduce and navigate uncertainty in everyday life. This thesis aims to understand the cognitive basis of human’s information-gathering behavior under uncertainty. On one hand, different kinds of uncertainty could prompt different strategies in information gathering. On the other hand, uncertainty is associated with varied, yet unpleasant, affective experiences including heightened physiological arousal, which could impair people’s ability to make adaptive decisions and is especially worsened in psychopathology such as anxiety. The current body of work focuses on factors influencing information gathering behavior with a focus on characterizing individual differences as well as the influence of decision variables on the strategies people utilize.

Chapters 1 and 2 examine human’s exploratory behavior, which reflects a trade off between immediate reward and gaining information about the environment. Given the close link between anxiety and avoidance – which plausibly reflects insufficient exploration - I investigated the relationship between trait anxiety and exploration under volatility-induced uncertainty in Chapter 1. I first demonstrated that people use a hybrid of directed, random, and undirected exploration, which is sensitive to relative uncertainty, total uncertainty, and relative value respectively. I then mapped out the element-wise anxiety-exploration relationship and found that trait somatic anxiety – the propensity to experience physical symptoms of anxiety – is selectively associated with decreased directed exploration as well as decreased undirected exploration. Chapter 1 has also shown that somatic anxious individuals tend to underestimate relative uncertainty in the environment, providing a potential mechanism accounting for the negative link between somatic anxiety and directed exploration. Apart from trait factor, Chapter 2 examined the role of transitory physiological arousal – a state-level factor - in uncertainty-driven exploration. I used pupil size as a proxy of the locus coeruleus norepinephrinergic system activity, which plays an important role in arousal and has been consistently linked to both representing uncertainty and guiding learning under uncertainty. Chapter 2’s data suggests that the pupil size encodes the total uncertainty in the environment, which is subsequently used to guide people’s random exploration.

Chapter 3 focuses on the act of information-seeking without the prospect of a reward, quantified using the amount of effort people are willing to expend. Specifically, I investigated whether risk and ambiguity, two forms of uncertainty that exert differential effects on decision-making, influences information-seeking behavior differently. The results suggest that people overall exhibit higher valuation of non-instrumental information under risk than ambiguity. In addition, people show distinct patterns within risk and ambiguity: people exert more effort in exchange of information if it resolves more uncertainty under risk, while are insensitive to the uncertainty level under ambiguity. Across three studies, this body of work demonstrates the versatility of exploration and information-seeking behavior, adding to the expanding literature on how affective and cognitive factors shape human information-gathering behavior.