The role of uncertainty in attentional and choice exploration

Abstract

The exploitation-exploration (EE) trade-off describes how, when making a decision, an organism must often choose between a safe alternative with a known pay-off, and one or more riskier alternatives with uncertain pay-offs. Recently, the concept of the EE trade-off has been extended to the examination of how organisms distribute limited attentional resources between several stimuli. This work suggests that when the rules governing the environment are certain, participants learn to “exploit” by attending preferentially to cues that provide the most information about upcoming events. However, when the rules are uncertain, people “explore” by increasing their attention to all cues that may provide information to help in predicting upcoming events. In the current study, we examine how uncertainty affects the EE trade-off in attention using a contextual two-armed bandit task, where participants explore with both their attention and their choice behavior. We find evidence for an influence of uncertainty on the EE trade-off in both choice and attention. These findings provide support for the idea of an EE trade-off in attention, and that uncertainty is a primary motivator for exploration in both choice and attentional allocation.