Adaptive information source selection during hypothesis testing

Abstract

We consider how the information sources people use to test hypotheses change as the sparsity of the hypotheses - the proportion of items in the hypothesis space they include - changes. Specifically, we focus on understanding how requests for positive and negative evidence, which have been shown to be sensitive to hypothesis sparsity (Hendrickson, Navarro, & Perfors, in prep), are influenced by requests for specific instances, which show a positive bias and less sensitivity to sparsity (Markant & Gureckis, 2013). We find that people modify their information requests as a function of the sparsity of the hypotheses and they do so in this task primarily by by manipulating the rate of requesting ..