Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We search for various things every day – food, information onthe Internet or someone’s name in memory. Despite the dif-ferent nature of these tasks, they all have a common feature –a final goal with an unknown location in a complex environ-ment. This property of the search raises a problem of trade-offbetween exploration of new opportunities and exploitation ofthe known information. We used the data from the semanticfluency task experiment to investigate how humans switch be-tween exploration and exploitation strategies when they searchin memory and whether they do it optimally. On comparingfour different search models, the one that assumes that humansswitch search strategies according to the semantic quality ofthe current neighbourhood best fits the data. Moreover, par-ticipants who set higher thresholds for the words with betterquality of the neighbourhood tend to retrieve more words frommemory. We also used regression analysis to find out whichfactors affect efficiency of both search strategies.