IMPACT OF CHOICE FEEDBACK ON EXPLORATORY AND EXPLOITATIVE BEHAVIOR IN THE ONE-SHOT BART

Abstract

The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) is a behavioral instrument which has been reliably used to measure real-world risk-taking behavior. In our one-shot version of the BART, participants are presented with a series of balloons of various sizes, with larger balloons having a higher likelihood of popping. They are offered an economic incentive to inflate the balloon, but earn nothing if it pops. They may also choose to cache a smaller but certain number of points instead of choosing to inflate the balloon, making these decisions representative of an explore-exploit tradeoff. One condition in this version provides information about the outcome of each choice via an audio clip, and the other contains only partial feedback. In the full feedback condition, the participant gains information about the overall risk of inflating the balloon at no detriment to their score. We hypothesized that this condition would inform the participant’s future choices more accurately, causing response time to decrease. However, the results seem to indicate that participants are more motivated by the noxious stimulus of the balloon popping, as calculations of the one-way analysis of variance were not significant.