Belief certainty guides exploration choices during visual information foraging.

Abstract

Many everyday choices are subject to uncertainty, from parking a vehicle in a busy carpark to picking a university degree. To navigate uncertainty, decision-makers can forage for information about the underlying properties of an environment by strategically exploiting different information sources. However, the process by which foragers form beliefs and decide when to explore other sources remains unclear. To address this issue, we had participants (<i>N</i> = 80) explore two patches of moving dots in the visual periphery by fixating them in turn. In each patch, coherent motion signals were presented briefly at random intervals, and participants were tasked with judging which patch generated a higher rate of signals on average. We modeled participants' beliefs about the signal rates as probability distributions, which we updated during fixation periods using iterative Bayesian belief updating. The location and width of the distributions were taken as estimates of the signal rate and belief uncertainty, respectively. Certainty continued to increase after relative rate estimates reached a plateau, suggesting that certainty informs the choice to terminate foraging. During exploitations, certainty triggered decisions to explore by reaching a common threshold. The findings show that accumulation of belief certainty informs decision-making in foraging for visual information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).