Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13 (NIPS 2000)
Jonathan Nelson, Javier Movellan
People are active experimenters, not just passive observers, constantly seeking new information relevant to their goals. A reasonable approach to active information gathering is to ask questions and conduct experiments that maximize the expected information gain, given current beliefs (Fedorov 1972, MacKay 1992, Oaksford & Chater 1994). In this paper we present results on an exploratory experiment designed to study people's active information gathering behavior on a concept task (Tenenbaum 2000). The results of the experiment are analyzed in terms of the expected information gain of the questions asked by subjects.