Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Exploration and Exploitation represent two mutually exclusive goals associated with choices within an environment:search too little and the lack of information will make it difficult to distinguish good options penalizing the agent inthe long run (exploiting) or search too much and suffer sub-optimal performance in the short term (exploring). Striking abalance between exploiting and exploring requires the learner to behave optimally in different environments. Managingthis trade-off is an important process of our lives but isnt completely understood from a cognitive science perspective. Tothis end we present the findings from an experiment where the main objective was to examine how much the presence ofcompetition and threats affects both behaviors: the presence of competition directs greater exploration and the presenceof threats reduces this behavior, suggesting that learners prioritize their learning behavior in response to the presence ofdifferent types of agents in the environment.