Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People are often faced with choices where there is a conflictbetween seeking reward and gathering information. In manyof these cases there exists a functional relationship betweenthe features associated with actions and their correspondingrewards. Accounts of how people make decisions in thesecircumstances have not considered how peoples’ strategiesdepend on the complexity of this function, as well as theperson’s goal. In a sequential decision making task we foundthat people chose between a number of different explorationstrategies, but that strategy selection did not necessarily alignwith goal or account for function complexity.