Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We assessed the influence of instrumental outcome divergence – the extent to which actions differ in terms of their outcome probability distributions – on behavioral preference in a two-alternative forced choice task. We found that participants preferred a pair of available actions with high divergence to a pair with low divergence. The effect of outcome divergence, dissociated here from that of other motivational and information theoretic factors, potentially reveals the value of flexible control.