The effect of noninstrumental information on reward learning

TL;DR

People are willing to give up money to get information about future outcomes, even when it doesn't help them earn more.

Contribution

The study shows that people's willingness to pay for information isn't due to misunderstanding reward structures.

Findings

Participants forgo financial rewards to receive noninstrumental information about future outcomes.

Participants accurately learned reward structures regardless of receiving advance information.

The intrinsic value of information extends to experience-based learning tasks.

Abstract

Investigations of information-seeking often highlight people’s tendency to forgo financial reward in return for advance information about future outcomes. Most of these experiments use tasks in which reward contingencies are described to participants. The use of such descriptions leaves open the question of whether the opportunity to obtain such noninstrumental information influences people’s ability to learn and represent the underlying reward structure of an experimental environment. In two experiments, participants completed a two-armed bandit task with monetary incentives where reward contingencies were learned via trial-by-trial experience. We find, akin to description-based tasks, that participants are willing to forgo financial reward to receive information about a delayed, unchangeable outcome. Crucially, however, there is little evidence this willingness to pay for information is driven by an inaccurate representation of the reward structure: participants’ representations approximated the underlying reward structure regardless of the presence of advance noninstrumental information. The results extend previous conclusions regarding the intrinsic value of information to an experience-based domain and highlight challenges of probing participants’ memories for experienced rewards.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13421-024-01537-4.

Figures