ArticleNature human behaviour2021
The computational cost of active information sampling before decision-making under uncertainty.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 19 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.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Modeling information demand in the framework of probabilistic reasoning.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Predictive use of environmental regularities requires action relevance.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Effort and salience jointly drive saccade selection.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Active information sampling in health and disease.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Review
- Effort drives saccade selection.eLife · 2025Article
- Fluctuations in Sequential Many-Alternative Decisions Reveal Strategies Beyond Immediate Reward Maximisation.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Using Computational Phenotyping to Identify Divergent Strategies for Effort Allocation Across the Psychosis Spectrum.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2024Article
- The role of the human hippocampus in decision-making under uncertainty.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Boosting Serotonin Increases Information Gathering by Reducing Subjective Cognitive Costs.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Movement characteristics impact decision-making and vice versa.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Humans trade off search costs and accuracy in a combined visual search and perceptual task.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Environmental uncertainty and the advantage of impulsive choice strategies.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Control over sampling boosts numerical evidence processing in human decisions from experience.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Preferences for seeking effort or reward information bias the willingness to work.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Cognitive Control as a Multivariate Optimization Problem.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Aversive motivation and cognitive control.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- Examining the Role of Stress and Team Support in Decision Making under Uncertainty and Time Pressure.MDM policy & practiceArticle
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Humans often seek information to minimize the pervasive effect of uncertainty on decisions. Current theories explain how much knowledge people should gather before a decision, based on the cost-benefit structure of the problem at hand. Here, we demonstrate that this framework omits a crucial agent-related factor: the cognitive effort expended while collecting information. Using an active sampling model, we unveil a speed-efficiency trade-off whereby more informative samples take longer to find. Crucially, under sufficient time pressure, humans can break this trade-off, sampling both faster and more efficiently. Computational modelling demonstrates the existence of a cost of cognitive effort which, when incorporated into theoretical models, provides a better account of people's behaviour and also relates to self-reported fatigue accumulated during active sampling. Thus, the way people seek knowledge to guide their decisions is shaped not only by task-related costs and benefits, but also crucially by the quantifiable computational costs incurred.
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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.