Information seeking criteria: Artificial intelligence, economics, psychology, and neuroscience

Abstract

There has been an enormous amount of interest in how the brain seeks information. The study of this issue is a rapidly growing field in neuroscience. Information seeking is to make informative choices among multiple alternatives. A central issue in information seeking is how the value of information is assessed in order to choose informative alternatives. This issue has been studied in psychology, economics, and artificial intelligence. The present review is focused on information assessment and summarizes the psychological and computational criteria with which humans and computers assess information. Based on the summary, neurophysiological findings are discussed. In addition, a computational view of the relationships between these criteria is presented.