Intrinsic Valuation of Information in Decision Making under Uncertainty

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.Author Summary: Acquiring information about the external world is vital for planning and decision making. However, recent research has shown that some animals choose to acquire information at considerable cost even when the information is of no practical benefit, a counter-intuitive behavior associated with suboptimal outcomes. In this study, we demonstrate that humans also engage in this suboptimal behavior by forfeiting future monetary reward in exchange for early but unusable information about future outcomes. Our results suggest that participants attach a value to information beyond its purely instrumental value. This preference for information may help account for apparent anomalies in human choice behavior such as compulsive checking behaviors in obsessive-compulsive disorder, and excessive and wasteful use of uninformative laboratory testing in hospitals.