Strength of Belief Guides Information Foraging
通过医学诊断实验，研究了信念更新如何影响人们对信息源价值的感知，发现假设变化会系统性地改变测试偏好，并模拟了搜索前过程对信息搜索的影响。
Theories of how people value and search for information share the assumption that beliefs give rise to the perceived value of information. However, few studies have directly addressed the pre-search processes that influence information-foraging behavior. This experiment examined the influence of pre-search belief updating on the perceived value of information sources. A sample of college students completed a hypothesis-testing, medical-diagnosis task. The experiment used medical tests with equal objective informative value before unveiling a presenting symptom intended to alter the strength of belief in different disease hypotheses. The observed patterns of test selection suggest that changes in beliefs about disease hypotheses result in systematic and predictable changes in test preference—a notion we refer to as the principle of hypothesis-guided search . We also present a simulation of how pre-search processes (e.g., hypothesis generation and working memory capacity) and task variables (e.g., time pressure) influence subsequent information search.