Comparing Anticipation and Uncertainty-Penalty Accounts of Noninstrumental Information Seeking

Proposed psychological mechanisms generating noninstrumental information seeking in humans can be broadly categorized into two competing accounts: the maximization of anticipating rewards versus an aversion to uncertainty. We compare three separate formalizations of these theories on their ability to track the dependency of information-seeking behavior on increasing levels of cue-outcome delay as well as their sensitivity to outcome valence. Across three experiments using a variety of different stimuli, we observe a flat to monotonically increasing pattern of delay dependency and minimal evidence of sensitivity to outcome valence-patterns which are better predicted, qualitatively and quantitatively, by an uncertainty aversion information model.