Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When gathering information, different sources typically have distinct levels of informativeness. Therefore, it is optimalto actively select the source of information to learn from (i.e., perform active learning). It has been debated whetherhumans optimize task performance in active learning or use a simple heuristic of seeking information that confirms theirbeliefs. Critically, depending on ones subjective beliefs, confirmation bias can in fact be optimal. Thus, without measuringsubjective beliefs, previous approaches were unable to distinguish between these alternatives. Using a perceptual decision-making task, we measured participants subjective beliefs before and after a new piece of information was presented.We then characterized confirmation-based and performance optimizing strategies with respect to these subjective beliefs.We found that participants strategy was dominated by confirmation bias, modulated only weakly by the performanceoptimization. We discuss potential reasons that may limit performance optimization in active learning.