ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2014
Humans use directed and random exploration to solve the explore-exploit dilemma.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT05178381 (Evaluating the Neurocomputational Mechanisms of Explore-Exploit Decision Making in Older Adults), which is not on this map. Cited by 252 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Evaluating the Neurocomputational Mechanisms of Explore-Exploit Decision Making in Older Adults
Who cites it
252 citing papers in PubMed.
- Problematic social media use is associated with altered directed exploration under uncertainty.Addictive behaviors reports · 2026Article
- Self-relevance dynamically biases exploration and exploitation in value-based decisions.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Neurobehavioral differences in value-based decision making between people with cocaine use disorder and controls.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Novelty-seeking and directed exploration scale with dissociable social network outcomes and brain systems in older adults.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Dopamine depletion in Parkinson's increases directed but not random exploration.Science advances · 2026Article
- Computational mechanisms of learning and forgetting differentiate affective and substance use disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Foraging models explain human exploration in uncertain tasks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Inferring the causes of noise from binary outcomes: A normative theory of learning under uncertainty.Psychological review · 2026Article
- Competing value signals impair reward-learning via dopaminergic mechanisms and increase exploration.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Disinformation elicits learning biases.eLife · 2026Article
- Spatiotemporal Decoding of Explore-Exploit Decisions in the Human Brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Recurrent Neural Network Exploration Strategies During Reinforcement Learning Depend on Network Capacity.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Addressing degeneracy in rodent studies of cognition.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Stochastic choice drives variability in patch foraging decisions in humans and rats.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- On Intention and Fluctuations in the Coordination Dynamics of Animate Movement.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Distinct patterns of social contagion under risk and ambiguity.Communications psychology · 2026Article
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- Separating random and deterministic sources of computational noise in explore-exploit decisions.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Competing cognitive pressures on human exploration in the absence of trade-off with exploitation.Nature communications · 2026Article
192 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
All adaptive organisms face the fundamental tradeoff between pursuing a known reward (exploitation) and sampling lesser-known options in search of something better (exploration). Theory suggests at least two strategies for solving this dilemma: a directed strategy in which choices are explicitly biased toward information seeking, and a random strategy in which decision noise leads to exploration by chance. In this work we investigated the extent to which humans use these two strategies. In our "Horizon task," participants made explore-exploit decisions in two contexts that differed in the number of choices that they would make in the future (the time horizon). Participants were allowed to make either a single choice in each game (horizon 1), or 6 sequential choices (horizon 6), giving them more opportunity to explore. By modeling the behavior in these two conditions, we were able to measure exploration-related changes in decision making and quantify the contributions of the two strategies to behavior. We found that participants were more information seeking and had higher decision noise with the longer horizon, suggesting that humans use both strategies to solve the exploration-exploitation dilemma. We thus conclude that both information seeking and choice variability can be controlled and put to use in the service of exploration.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.