Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In order to make accurate inferences and judgments, one needs to not only be able to aptly evaluate and integrate informa-tion, but be able to seek and acquire the right information in the first place. The present work explored human informationacquisition and evaluation in a novel probability context and utilising a more naturalistic criminal investigation scenario.Focus was placed on exploring the relationship between searching for information, evaluating it and integrating it withinones belief model in order to make a causal judgement. Results indicated that although participants search choices ap-proximated those of informed Bayesian OED models, belief updating accuracy systematically decreased throughout thetask. Findings suggested a dichotomy between information evaluation and belief integration, questioning the descriptiveabilities of OED principles to account for these processes. The implications of these finding in relation to the psychologicalliterature of human inquiry are discussed.