Intrinsic Valuation of Information in Decision Making under Uncertainty

Abstract

In a dynamic world, an accurate model of the environment is vital for survival, and agents ought regularly to seek out new information with which to update their world models. This aspect of behaviour is not captured well by classical theories of decision making, and the cognitive mechanisms of information seeking are poorly understood. In particular, it is not known whether information is valued only for its instrumental use, or whether humans also assign it a non-instrumental intrinsic value. To address this question, the present study assessed preference for non-instrumental information among 80 healthy participants in two experiments. Participants performed a novel information preference task in which they could choose to pay a monetary cost to receive advance information about the outcome of a monetary lottery. Importantly, acquiring information did not alter lottery outcome probabilities. We found that participants were willing to incur considerable monetary costs to acquire payoff-irrelevant information about the lottery outcome. This behaviour was well explained by a computational cognitive model in which information preference resulted from aversion to temporally prolonged uncertainty. These results strongly suggest that humans assign an intrinsic value to information in a manner inconsistent with normative accounts of decision making under uncertainty. This intrinsic value may be associated with adaptive behaviour in real-world environments by producing a bias towards exploratory and information-seeking behaviour.

Anxious and obsessive-compulsive traits are independently associated with valuation of non-instrumental information

“…Figure 2A presents choice behaviour across payout domains and costs. In line with previous findings (Bennett et al, 2016;Brydevall et al, 2018), on average participants displayed an above-chance preference for observing the informative stimulus when it was free (p < .001, Wilcoxon signed-rank test), and displayed a strong modulation of choice behaviour by the cost of information (β = -0.16, p < .001, logistic regression). Participants also displayed a weaker overall preference for information in the loss domain relative to the gain domain (β = -0.06, p < .05).…”

“…If they failed to do so, one dollar was deducted from their endowment. Applying the same exclusion criterion as in previous studies (Bennett et al, 2016;Brydevall et al, 2018), we excluded participants' data from further analysis if they failed to respond to more than two catch trials in total across the task.…”

“…The present study used a non-instrumental information seeking task (Bennett, Bode, Brydevall, Warren, & Murawski, 2016;Brydevall, Bennett, Murawski, & Bode, 2018) to compute a behavioural measure of aversion to uncertainty that is not affected by these confounds. In contrast to instrumental information, non-instrumental information reduces one's uncertainty but cannot be used to alter any future behaviour (for example, information about whether or not a foregone conclusion will occur).…”

“…This behaviour is also unconfounded by threat overestimation or risk aversion, since these confounds are induced by the instrumentality of information. Previous research has shown that humans and other animals behave as though non-instrumental information has an intrinsic value, and will even pay an explicit cost to acquire it (Bennett et al, 2016;Blanchard, Hayden, & Bromberg-Martin, 2015;Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009Brydevall et al, 2018;Cabrero, Zhu, & Ludvig, 2019;Charpentier, Bromberg-Martin, & Sharot, 2018;Iigaya, Story, Kurth-Nelson, Dolan, & Dayan, 2016;Vasconcelos, Monteiro, & Kacelnik, 2015), even though this leads to a reduction in future expected reward. In humans, there is marked heterogeneity in the strength of this preference (Bennett et al, 2016), suggesting individual differences in aversion to uncertainty that resemble those proposed in theories of obsessive-compulsion and anxiety (Krohne, 1993;Sorrentino et al, 1990).…”

Neural dynamics of voluntary decision-making

“…These effects are evident even when there is no benefit to be gained from the ability to choose. In some cases, individuals will even sacrifice potential reward in exchange for information about choice options, despite not having the ability to change the outcomes (Bennett et al, 2016). This has led to the suggestion that choice may provide inherent value, potentially serving to encourage an agent to exercise control over the environment (Inesi et al, 2011;.…”