Recording
Speaker
Robert C. Wilson
Bio
Bob Wilson is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona. Bob is interested in the computational neuroscience of decision-making, studying all kinds of choices from simple perceptual decisions to judgments about phishing emails. Outside of the lab, Bob enjoys raising chickens and learning the piano.
Abstract
Many decisions involve a trade-off between exploring unknown options for information and exploiting known options for a more certain payoff. In this talk, I will present evidence that people use two strategies to solve these explore-exploit dilemmas: directed exploration, driven by information, and random exploitation, driven by noise. These two strategies appear to rely on dissociable cognitive and neural processes, but I will show that they can arise from a single model based on mental simulation. This model accounts for the effects of uncertainty, time horizon, and the informativeness of feedback on directed and random exploitation as well as more recent findings suggesting that random exploitation is truly random. I will end with a discussion of our future work on real-world decisions.