Topic: information bonus

Many organisms, including humans, face the dilemma between choosing an option with a well-known output (exploitation) and sampling from a lesser known alternative (exploration). There are two common strategies used in solving this dilemma. One strategy is to guide decisions based on an “information bonus”, by choosing the option that provides more information (directed exploration). A second strategy is to maintain a certain decision noise, thus with an increased sampling of other options “by chance” (random exploration). Previous work by Wilson et al. (2014) showed that humans use both of th