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Generalization and search in risky environments

Eric Schulz, Charley M. Wu, Quentin J. M. Huys, Andreas Krause, Maarten Speekenbrink
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/227322
Eric Schulz
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University
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Charley M. Wu
2Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
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Quentin J. M. Huys
3Translational Neuromodeling Unit, ETH and University of Zürich
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Andreas Krause
4Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich
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Maarten Speekenbrink
5Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London
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Abstract

How do people pursue rewards in risky environments, where some outcomes should be avoided at all costs? We investigate how participant search for spatially correlated rewards in scenarios where one must avoid sampling rewards below a given threshold. This requires not only the balancing of exploration and exploitation, but also reasoning about how to avoid potentially risky areas of the search space. Within risky versions of the spatially correlated multi-armed bandit task, we show that participants’ behavior is aligned well with a Gaussian process function learning algorithm, which chooses points based on a safe optimization routine. Moreover, using leave-one-block-out cross-validation, we find that participants adapt their sampling behavior to the riskiness of the task, although the underlying function learning mechanism remains relatively unchanged. These results show that participants can adapt their search behavior to the adversity of the environment and enrich our understanding of adaptive behavior in the face of risk and uncertainty.

Footnotes

  • A preliminary version of this work has been published in the proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society as Schulz, Huys, Bach, Speekenbrink, and Krause (2016).

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 14, 2018.
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Generalization and search in risky environments
Eric Schulz, Charley M. Wu, Quentin J. M. Huys, Andreas Krause, Maarten Speekenbrink
bioRxiv 227322; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/227322
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Generalization and search in risky environments
Eric Schulz, Charley M. Wu, Quentin J. M. Huys, Andreas Krause, Maarten Speekenbrink
bioRxiv 227322; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/227322

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