Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People tend to place value on information even when it doesnot affect the outcome of a decision. Two competingaccounts offer explanations for such non-instrumentalinformation seeking. One account foregrounds the role ofanticipation and the other focusses on uncertainty aversion.Both accounts make similar predictions for short cue-outcome delays and when outcomes are positively valenced,but they differ in their explanation of information preferenceat long delays with negative outcomes. We present a seriesof experiments involving both primary and secondaryreinforcers that pit these accounts against each other. Theresults indicate a consistent preference for non-instrumentalinformation even at long cue-outcome delays and noevidence for information avoidance with negative outcomes.This pattern appears to provide more support for theuncertainty-aversion account than one based on anticipation.