Author(s)

Magda Osman, Brian D. Glass, Zuzana Hola, Susanne Stollewerk

Queen Mary University of London, London, England.

On what basis do we learn to make effective decisions when faced with intermittent feedback from actions taken in a dynamic decision-making environment? In the present study we hypothesize that reward information (financial, social) may provide useful signals that can guide decision-making in these situations. To examine this, we present three experiments in which people make decisions directly towards controlling a dynamically uncertain output. We manipulate the framing of incentives (gains and losses) and the form of the incentives (financial, social), and measure their impact on decision-making performance (both in frequent and intermittent output feedback conditions). Overall, performance suffered under intermittent output feedback. Relative to social rewards, financial rewards generally improved control performance, and a gains framing (financial, social) leading to better performance than a losses framing (financial, social). To understand how rewards affect behavior in our tasks, we present a reinforcement learning model to capture the learning and performance profiles in each of our experiments. This study shows that information regarding incentives impacts the levels of exploration, the optimality of decisions-making, and the variability in the strategies people develop to control a dynamic output experienced frequently and intermittently.

Intermittent vs. Frequent Feedback, Rewards, Outcome Feedback, Dynamic Decision-Making, Uncertainty, Control

Osman, M. , Glass, B. , Hola, Z. and Stollewerk, S. (2017) Reward and Feedback in the Control over Dynamic Events. Psychology, 8, 1063-1089. doi: 10.4236/psych.2017.87070.