Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, UK.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, UK; University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford, UK.
Cogn Psychol. 2020 Dec;123:101332. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101332. Epub 2020 Sep 23.
Within the domain of psychology, Optimal Experimental Design (OED) principles have been used to model how people seek and evaluate information. Despite proving valuable as computational-level methods to account for people's behaviour, their descriptive and explanatory powers remain largely unexplored. In a series of experiments, we used a naturalistic crime investigation scenario to examine how people evaluate queries, as well as outcomes, in probabilistic contexts. We aimed to uncover the psychological strategies that people use, not just to assess whether they deviated from OED principles. In addition, we explored the adaptiveness of the identified strategies across both one-shot and stepwise information search tasks. We found that people do not always evaluate queries strictly in OED terms and use distinct strategies, such as by identifying a leading contender at the outset. Moreover, we identified aspects of zero-sum thinking and risk aversion that interact with people's information search strategies. Our findings have implications for building a descriptive account of information seeking and evaluation, accounting for factors that currently lie outside the realm of information-theoretic OED measures, such as context and the learner's own preferences.
在心理学领域，最优实验设计（Optimal Experimental Design，OED）原则被用于模拟人们如何搜索和评估信息。尽管这些原则已经被证明是一种有价值的计算水平方法，可以用来解释人们的行为，但它们的描述和解释能力在很大程度上仍未得到探索。在一系列实验中，我们使用自然主义的犯罪调查场景来研究人们如何在概率环境中评估查询以及结果。我们旨在揭示人们使用的心理策略，而不仅仅是评估他们是否偏离了 OED 原则。此外，我们还探索了在单次和逐步信息搜索任务中，所确定策略的适应性。我们发现，人们并不总是严格按照 OED 的标准来评估查询，而是会使用不同的策略，例如一开始就确定一个主要的竞争者。此外，我们还发现了零和思维和风险规避的一些方面，它们与人们的信息搜索策略相互作用。我们的研究结果对于构建信息搜索和评估的描述性解释具有重要意义，考虑到了目前超出信息论 OED 度量范围的因素，如上下文和学习者自身的偏好。
