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Chapter 7 - Exploration Beyond Bandits

from Part II - How Do Humans Search for Information?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2022

By
Franziska Brändle ,
Marcel Binz  and
Eric Schulz
Edited by
Irene Cogliati Dezza ,
Eric Schulz  and
Charley M. Wu
Irene Cogliati Dezza
Affiliation:
University College London
Eric Schulz
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für biologische Kybernetik, Tübingen
Charley M. Wu
Affiliation:
Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany
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Summary

The ability to seek out new information is crucial in many situations of our everyday lives. In general, people can display quite elaborated exploration behavior. However, exploration has mainly been studied in multiarmed bandit tasks and theories have predominantly focused on simple directed and random exploration strategies. In this chapter, we review the results of prior studies and argue that the repertoire of human exploration strategies is much more diverse than how it is portrayed in the literature. However, to find evidence for more sophisticated strategies, more complex paradigms than multiarmed bandits are required. In particular, we argue that Markov Decision Processes offer an interesting new setting that allows us to capture strategies beyond random and directed exploration, such as empowerment-based strategies or strategies that explore using explicit goals. We conclude this chapter by discussing several new experimental paradigms that could advance our understanding of human exploration to the next level.

Keywords

Directed explorationrandom explorationmultiarmed banditMarkov decision processesinformation search
Type
Chapter
Information
The Drive for Knowledge
The Science of Human Information Seeking
 , pp. 147 - 168
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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