ArticleCurrent opinion in behavioral sciences2021
Balancing exploration and exploitation with information and randomization.
Article in Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 95 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
95 citing papers in PubMed.
- Automatic value learning results in counterproductive human behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Foraging models explain human exploration in uncertain tasks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Resolving Feynman's restaurant problem reveals optimal solutions and human strategies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Article
- Stochastic choice drives variability in patch foraging decisions in humans and rats.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Separating random and deterministic sources of computational noise in explore-exploit decisions.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Estimating the motor exploration in reinforcement learning.iScience · 2026Article
- Competing cognitive pressures on human exploration in the absence of trade-off with exploitation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Responsible leadership as a catalyst for sustainable performance: a perspective on psychological and knowledge search mechanisms.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Social learning and exploration-exploitation dilemma in decision-making.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2026Review
- Pupil size predicts exploration through critical slowing in prefrontal dynamics.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Whom do we prefer to learn from in observational reinforcement learning?PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Rats pursue food and leisure following the same rational principles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Computational Approaches Reveal Developmental Shifts in Exploratory Play.Developmental science · 2025Article
- How cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic subnetworks can shift decision policies to increase reward rate.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Novelty as a drive of human exploration in complex stochastic environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Directed exploration is reduced by an aversive interoceptive state induction in healthy individuals but not in those with affective disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
35 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Explore-exploit decisions require us to trade off the benefits of exploring unknown options to learn more about them, with exploiting known options, for immediate reward. Such decisions are ubiquitous in nature, but from a computational perspective, they are notoriously hard. There is therefore much interest in how humans and animals make these decisions and recently there has been an explosion of research in this area. Here we provide a biased and incomplete snapshot of this field focusing on the major finding that many organisms use two distinct strategies to solve the explore-exploit dilemma: a bias for information ('directed exploration') and the randomization of choice ('random exploration'). We review evidence for the existence of these strategies, their computational properties, their neural implementations, as well as how directed and random exploration vary over the lifespan. We conclude by highlighting open questions in this field that are ripe to both explore and exploit.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.