36 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Boredom, Information-Seeking and Exploration
Any adaptive organism faces the choice between taking
actions with known benefits (exploitation), and sampling new
actions to check for other, more valuable opportunities
available (exploration). The latter involves information-
seeking, a drive so fundamental to learning and long-term
reward that it can reasonably be considered, through evolution
or development, to have acquired its own value, independent
of immediate reward. Similarly, behaviors that fail to yield
information may have come to be associated with aversive
experiences such as boredom, demotivation, and task
disengagement. In accord with these suppositions, we propose
that boredom reflects an adaptive signal for managing the
exploration-exploitation tradeoff, in the service of optimizing
information acquisition and long-term reward. We tested
participants in three experiments, manipulating the
information content in their immediate task environment, and
showed that increased perceptions of boredom arise in
environments in which there is little useful information, and
that higher boredom correlates with higher exploration. These
findings are the first step toward a model formalizing the
relationship between exploration, exploitation and boredom
Engaging diverse underserved communities to bridge the mammography divide
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Breast cancer screening continues to be underutilized by the population in general, but is particularly underutilized by traditionally underserved minority populations. Two of the most at risk female minority groups are American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/AN) and Latinas. American Indian women have the poorest recorded 5-year cancer survival rates of any ethnic group while breast cancer is the number one cause of cancer mortality among Latina women. Breast cancer screening rates for both minority groups are near or at the lowest among all racial/ethnic groups. As with other health screening behaviors, women may intend to get a mammogram but their intentions may not result in initiation or follow through of the examination process. An accumulating body of research, however, demonstrates the efficacy of developing 'implementation intentions' that define when, where, and how a specific behavior will be performed. The formulation of intended steps in addition to addressing potential barriers to test completion can increase a person's self-efficacy, operationalize and strengthen their intention to act, and close gaps between behavioral intention and completion. To date, an evaluation of the formulation of implementation intentions for breast cancer screening has not been conducted with minority populations.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>In the proposed program, community health workers will meet with rural-dwelling Latina and American Indian women one-on-one to educate them about breast cancer and screening and guide them through a computerized and culturally tailored "implementation intentions" program, called <it>Healthy Living Kansas - Breast Health</it>, to promote breast cancer screening utilization. We will target Latina and AI/AN women from two distinct rural Kansas communities. Women attending community events will be invited by CHWs to participate and be randomized to either a mammography "implementation intentions" (<b>MI</b><sup><b>2</b></sup>) intervention or a comparison general breast cancer prevention informational intervention (<b>C</b>). CHWs will be armed with notebook computers loaded with our Healthy Living Kansas - Breast Health program and guide their peers through the program. Women in the <b>MI</b><sup><b>2 </b></sup>condition will receive assistance with operationalizing their screening intentions and identifying and addressing their stated screening barriers with the goal of guiding them toward accessing screening services near their community. Outcomes will be evaluated at 120-days post randomization via self-report and will include mammography utilization status, barriers, and movement along a behavioral stages of readiness to screen model.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>This highly innovative project will be guided and initiated by AI/AN and Latina community members and will test the practical application of emerging behavioral theory among minority persons living in rural communities.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>ClinicalTrials (NCT): <a href="http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01267110">NCT01267110</a></p
Recommended from our members
Mnemonic convergence in social networks: The emergent properties of cognition at a collective level
The development of shared memories, beliefs, and norms is a
fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent
outcomes are thought to occur owing to a dynamic system of
information sharing and memory updating, which fundamentally
depends on communication. Here we report results on the formation
of collective memories in laboratory-created communities. We manipulated conversational network structure in a series of real-time,
computer-mediated interactions in fourteen 10-member communities.
The results show that mnemonic convergence, measured as the
degree of overlap among community members’ memories, is influenced by both individual-level information-processing phenomena
and by the conversational social network structure created during
conversational recall. By studying laboratory-created social networks,
we show how large-scale social phenomena (i.e., collective memory)
can emerge out of microlevel local dynamics (i.e., mnemonic reinforcement and suppression effects). The social-interactionist approach proposed herein points to optimal strategies for spreading information in
social networks and provides a framework for measuring and forging
collective memories in communities of individuals
Recommended from our members
Information-Seeking, Learning and the Marginal Value Theorem: A Normative Approach to Adaptive Exploration
Daily life often makes us decide between two goals:
maximizing immediate rewards (exploitation) and learning
about the environment so as to improve our options for future
rewards (exploration). An adaptive organism therefore should
place value on information independent of immediate reward,
and affective states may signal such value (e.g., curiosity vs.
boredom: Hill & Perkins, 1985; Eastwood et al. 2012). This
tradeoff has been well studied in “bandit” tasks involving
choice among a fixed number of options, but is equally
pertinent in situations such as foraging, hunting, or job search,
where one encounters a series of new options sequentially.
Here, we augment the classic serial foraging scenario to more
explicitly reward the development of knowledge. We develop
a formal model that quantifies the value of information in this
setting and how it should impact decision making, paralleling
the treatment of reward by the marginal value theorem (MVT)
in the foraging literature. We then present the results of an
experiment designed to provide an initial test of this model,
and discuss the implications of this information-foraging
framework on boredom and task disengagement
Recommended from our members
Mnemonic convergence in social networks: The emergent properties of cognition at a collective level
The development of shared memories, beliefs, and norms is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur owing to a dynamic system of information sharing and memory updating, which fundamentally depends on communication. Here we report results on the formation of collective memories in laboratory-created communities. We manipulated conversational network structure in a series of real-time, computer-mediated interactions in fourteen 10-member communities. The results show that mnemonic convergence, measured as the degree of overlap among community members’ memories, is influenced by both individual-level information-processing phenomena and by the conversational social network structure created during conversational recall. By studying laboratory-created social networks, we show how large-scale social phenomena (i.e., collective memory) can emerge out of microlevel local dynamics (i.e., mnemonic reinforcement and suppression effects). The social-interactionist approach proposed herein points to optimal strategies for spreading information in social networks and provides a framework for measuring and forging collective memories in communities of individuals
Recommended from our members
Humans use directed and random exploration to solve the explore–exploit dilemma
All adaptive organisms face the fundamental tradeoff between pursuing a known reward (exploitation) and sampling lesser-known options in search of something better (exploration). Theory suggests at least two strategies for solving this dilemma: a directed strategy in which choices are explicitly biased toward information seeking, and a random strategy in which decision noise leads to exploration by chance. In this work we investigated the extent to which humans use these two strategies. In our “Horizon task,” participants made explore–exploit decisions in two contexts that differed in the number of choices that they would make in the future (the time horizon). Participants were allowed to make either a single choice in each game (horizon 1), or 6 sequential choices (horizon 6), giving them more opportunity to explore. By modeling the behavior in these two conditions, we were able to measure exploration-related changes in decision making and quantify the contributions of the two strategies to behavior. We found that participants were more information seeking and had higher decision noise with the longer horizon, suggesting that humans use both strategies to solve the exploration–exploitation dilemma. We thus conclude that both information seeking and choice variability can be controlled and put to use in the service of exploration