People often navigate new environments and must learn abouthow actions map to outcomes to achieve their goals. In this pa-per, we are concerned with how people direct their search andtrade off between selecting informative actions and actions thatwill be most immediately rewarding when they are faced withnew tasks. We find that some people selected globally infor-mative actions and were able to generalize from few observa-tions in order learn new reward structures efficiently. Theseparticipants also displayed the ability to transfer knowledgeacross similar tasks. However, a consistent proportion of par-ticipants behaved sub-optimally, caring more about observingnovel information instead of maximizing reward. Across fourexperiments, we present evidence that participants’ motivationto explore was influenced by 1) how much they already knewabout the underlying task structure and 2) whether their obser-vations remained available. We discuss possible explanationsbehind people’s exploratory drive.

Iconic words are known to exhibit an imitative relationshipbetween a word and its referent. Many studies have workedto pinpoint sound-to-meaning correspondences for ideophonesfrom different languages. The correspondence patterns showsimilarities across languages, but what makes such language-specific correspondences universal, as iconicity claims to be,remains unclear. This could be due to a lack of consensus onhow to describe and test the perceptuo-motor affordances thatmake an iconic word feel imitative to speakers. We created andanalyzed a database of 1,888 ideophones across 13 languages,and found that 5 articulatory properties, physiologically acces-sible to all spoken language users, pattern according to seman-tic features of ideophones. Our findings pave the way for futureresearch to utilize articulatory properties as a means to test andexplain how iconicity is encoded in spoken language.