Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does time pressure influence attitudes towards uncer-tainty? When time is limited, do people engage in differentexploration strategies? We study human exploration in a rangeof four-armed bandit tasks with different reward distributionsand manipulate the available time for each decision (limitedvs. unlimited). Through multiple behavioral and model-basedanalyses, we show that reactions towards uncertainty are influ-enced by time pressure. Specifically, participants seek out un-certain options when time is unlimited, but avoid uncertaintyunder time pressure. Moreover, larger relative differences inuncertainty between options slowed down reaction times anddampened the drift rate of a linear ballistic accumulator model.These results shed new light on the differential effect of uncer-tainty and time pressure on human exploration.