Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Balancing exploration and exploitation is difficult, and across a wide variety of situations under-exploration ofuncertain alternatives appears prevalent. We propose that one possible cause of under-exploration is present bias, wherebyimmediate rewards (like those gained from exploitation) loom larger than future rewards (like those gained from exploration).This possible cause of under-exploration is not addressed by past studies, in which choices generally yield token rewards thatare converted to money at the end of the experiment, removing the inter-temporal aspect of the decision-making process. Toaddress this issue, we developed an exploratory choice task with immediately-consumed rewards. We then tested whetherwhether imposing a temporal delay before the consumption of rewards increased exploration by decreasing present bias, andreport on our results.