Coenen Anna, Rehder Bob, Gureckis Todd M
Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, United States.
Cogn Psychol. 2015 Jun;79:102-33. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2015.02.004. Epub 2015 May 15.
How do people choose interventions to learn about causal systems? Here, we considered two possibilities. First, we test an information sampling model, information gain, which values interventions that can discriminate between a learner's hypotheses (i.e. possible causal structures). We compare this discriminatory model to a positive testing strategy that instead aims to confirm individual hypotheses. Experiment 1 shows that individual behavior is described best by a mixture of these two alternatives. In Experiment 2 we find that people are able to adaptively alter their behavior and adopt the discriminatory model more often after experiencing that the confirmatory strategy leads to a subjective performance decrement. In Experiment 3, time pressure leads to the opposite effect of inducing a change towards the simpler positive testing strategy. These findings suggest that there is no single strategy that describes how intervention decisions are made. Instead, people select strategies in an adaptive fashion that trades off their expected performance and cognitive effort.
人们如何选择干预措施来了解因果系统？在此，我们考虑了两种可能性。首先，我们测试一种信息采样模型——信息增益，它重视能够区分学习者假设（即可能的因果结构）的干预措施。我们将这种区分性模型与一种旨在证实个体假设的积极测试策略进行比较。实验1表明，个体行为最好用这两种方式的混合来描述。在实验2中，我们发现，在经历了证实性策略导致主观表现下降之后，人们能够适应性地改变其行为，并更频繁地采用区分性模型。在实验3中，时间压力导致了相反的效果，促使人们转向更简单的积极测试策略。这些发现表明，不存在单一的策略可以描述干预决策是如何做出的。相反，人们以一种适应性的方式选择策略，在预期表现和认知努力之间进行权衡。
