Supplemental Material for Humans Use Directed and Random Exploration to Solve the Explore–Exploit Dilemma

Abstract

Full instructions for the taskBefore taking part in the experiment, participants read a set of illustrated onscreen instructions describing the task and its mechanics.Here we provide the full text for these instructions.Each bullet point corresponds to a single screen in the instructions.In the interests of space we have not included the illustrations themselves.• Welcome!Thank you for volunteering for this experiment.• In this experiment we would like you to choose between two one-armed bandits of the sort you might find in a casino.• The one-armed bandits will be represented like this• Every time you choose to play a particular bandit, the lever will be pulled like this ...• ... and the payoff will be shown like this.For example, in this case, the left bandit has been played and is paying out 77 points.• Each bandit tends to pay out about the same amount of reward on average, but there is variability in the reward on any given play.• For example, the average reward for the bandit on the right might be 50 points, but on the first play we might see a reward of 52 points because of the variability ...• ... on the second play we might get 56 points ...• ... if we open a third box on the right we might get 45 points this time ...• ... and so on, such that if we were to play the right bandit 10 times in a row we might see these rewards ...• Both bandits will have the same kind of variability and this variability will stay constant throughout the experiment.

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