Topic: state-space uncertainty

Previous studies have used the reinforcement learning theory to explain how animals explore a task space to maximize reward. While recent works argued that uncertainty in valuation is the key variable to guide exploration, little is known about the role of another variable - the uncertainty in state-space representation. One reason is that a simple task design consisting of only a few states and actions cannot accommodate the uncertainty of the environmental structure. Here, we hypothesize that metacognition, the human's unique ability to introspect and estimate one's level of uncertainty, gui