Robert Wilson
Wednesday 13th July 2016
Time: 4.00pm
Ground Floor Seminar Room
25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG
Humans use information seeking and randomness to solve the
explore-exploit dilemma
When you go to your favorite restaurant, do you always get the same
thing, or do you try something new? Sticking with an old favorite
ensures a good meal, but exploring other options might yield something
better - or something worse. This simple conundrum, choosing between
what you know and what you don't, is called the
exploration-exploitation dilemma. Whether it's deciding on a meal, a
vacation destination or a life partner, this is an important problem
for humans and animals to solve.
In this talk I will discuss how humans solve the explore-exploit
dilemma. Theory suggests two distinct strategies: a directed
strategy, in which choices are biased toward information, and a random
strategy, in which exploration is driven by noise. Here I will show
that humans use both approaches, and that furthermore, the mixture of
random and directed exploration is optimal in that it maximizes reward
in the long run. These results have implications for our
understanding of how decisions impact learning, the role of
exploration in development and mental disorders, and even for choosing
what to eat for dinner.
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