Abstract Uncertainty is ubiquitous in cognitive processing. In this study, we aim to investigate the ability agents possess to track and report the noise inherent in their mental operations, often in the form of confidence judgments. Here, we argue that humans can use uncertainty inherent in their representations of value beliefs to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation. Such uncertainty is reflected in explicit confidence judgments. Using a novel variant of a multi-armed bandit paradigm, we studied how beliefs were formed and how uncertainty in the encoding of these value beliefs (belief confidence) evolved over time. We found that people used uncertainty to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation, reflected in a higher tendency toward exploration when their confidence in their value representations was low. We furthermore found that value uncertainty can be linked to frameworks of metacognition in decision making in two ways. First, belief confidence drives decision confidence, i.e. people’s evaluation of their own choices. Second, individuals with higher metacognitive insight into their choices were also better at tracing the uncertainty in their environment. Together, these findings argue that such uncertainty representations play a key role in the context of cognitive control.

中文翻译：

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信心调节基于价值的学习中的探索和开发

摘要不确定性在认知过程中无处不在。在这项研究中，我们旨在调查行为者通常以信心判断的形式来跟踪和报告其心理操作中固有的噪声的能力。在这里，我们认为，人类可以利用其价值信念表征中固有的不确定性在勘探与开发之间进行仲裁。这种不确定性反映在明确的信心判断中。使用多武装匪徒范式的新颖变体，我们研究了信念的形成方式以及这些价值信念（信念信心）编码的不确定性如何随时间演变。我们发现，人们使用不确定性在勘探与开发之间进行仲裁，这反映在人们对其价值表示的信心低下时，有更高的勘探倾向。我们还发现，价值不确定性可以通过两种方式与决策中的元认知框架相关联。首先，信念信心驱动决策信心，即人们对自己选择的评价。其次，对选择有较高元认知洞察力的人也更擅长追踪环境中的不确定性。总之，这些发现表明，这种不确定性表示在认知控制的背景下起着关键作用。