Recording
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Rh4y1a7iq/?vd_source=e9626f9767e6e22ece9d765f34ba01c5
Speaker
Haoxue Fan
Bio
Haoxue Fan is a fifth-year graduate student at Harvard working with Dr. Elizabeth Phelps. She is interested in how emotion interacts with decision-making under uncertainty, including cognitive processes such as exploration, information seeking, and planning. To answer these questions, she uses a combination of computational modeling, physiological measurements, and behavioral experiments. She is originally from Shanghai in China, and is always eager to know where is the best coffee and boba tea place in town :)
Abstract
Exploration is at the core of many real-life decisions, helping people gain information about the environment and make better choices in the long run. Although anxiety has been related to decreased physical exploration and avoidance behavior, past findings on the interaction between anxiety and exploration during decision-making under uncertainty were inconclusive. The current study provides a holistic picture of the anxiety-exploration relationship by focusing on latent factors of trait anxiety and different exploration strategies when facing volatility-induced uncertainty. Across two well-powered online studies (N = 984), we demonstrated that people used a hybrid of directed, random, and undirected exploration strategies, which were respectively sensitive to relative uncertainty, total uncertainty, and value difference. The somatic factor of trait anxiety, the propensity to experience physical symptoms of anxiety, was inversely correlated with directed exploration and undirected exploration, manifesting as being less likely to choose the uncertain option and reducing choice stochasticity regardless of uncertainty. Trait somatic anxiety was also related to underestimation of relative uncertainty, which could potentially account for its negative impact on directed exploration. Together, these results reveal the selective role of trait somatic anxiety and physiological arousal in modulating uncertainty-driven and value-driven exploration strategies. If time permits, I will also present a follow-up study where we examined the relationship between transitory physiological arousal - indexed by real-time pupil size - and exploration strategies. We showed that pupil size positively correlates with total uncertainty, suggesting a selective role of physiological arousal in driving uncertainty-driven random exploration. Additionally, we were able to decode subject-specific uncertainty estimates from pupillary data, which improves the predictive power of participants’ trial-by-trial choice variability.