Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns: Coping with Different States of Uncertainty in a Changing World

人们需要学习世界上大量事物之间的关系。有时，这些关系是非常一致的：当天黑时，我们按下电灯开关，灯几乎总是亮着的。但有时这些关系是不确定的：一名警察可能面对一群人，这种情况可能会也可能不会突然变得更加不稳定和暴力。在后一种情况下，人们面临着试图解决不确定性的问题，最好是在任何重要事件发生之前。为了对将要发生的事情做出准确的预测并采取行动，人们需要利用环境中可用的信息，以及从过去的经验中获得的知识。例如，警察可能需要注意人们的年龄、性别、人数和时间。其中一些“线索”可能特别相关，了解哪些是重要的，将有助于他们更好地预测可能发生的事情。在决定如何在这种复杂的环境中采取行动时，军官对这些线索的了解将是至关重要的。本项目旨在对认知系统应对不同不确定情况的方式进行彻底的实验研究。这项工作的出发点是将不同的不确定情况概念化为“预期的”或“意外的”。有时我们可以对我们可能面临的不确定性（预期的不确定性）提供一个很好的估计，但在其他情况下，不确定性会突然出现（意外的不确定性）。目前，心理学家对这些不同类型的不确定性是如何影响学习和注意力的基本过程的理解非常有限。在这项研究中，我们将进行三个系列的实验来解决这一知识差距。在系列1中，我们将研究不确定性如何影响刺激处理：人们是否会改变他们看待和关注刺激的方式；随着时间的推移，他们是否开始忽视刺激；他们没有将这些刺激转化为记忆吗？这将告诉我们在不确定的情况下，知觉和认知加工之间的关系是如何变化的。在第二系列中，我们将研究在复杂的不确定情况下，刺激物是如何在记忆中结合在一起的。是环境的不同部分被单独对待，还是作为不确定性的结果被更全面地考虑？这些数据对于理解不确定性如何改变我们周围世界的记忆内容具有重要意义。在系列3中，我们将学习在不确定的情况下如何学习事件之间的关系：人们是否需要更多的信息来确定存在的关系；环境的突然变化是否会让我们对未来的事件更加敏感？不确定性会影响我们所了解的一切，还是只影响那些被认为不确定的刺激？我们目前关于不确定性如何影响学习和注意力的理论已被证明不足以解释现有的已发表数据。目前的项目将帮助我们开发一套我们的模型需要解释的综合效应。该项目的最终目的是利用我们的发现来更新现有的行为理论。通过这样做，我们将提供不确定性如何影响学习和注意力的正式数学理论。

People are required to learn a vast number of relationships between things in the world. Sometimes these relationships are very consistent: when it is dark and we press a light switch, the light almost always turns on. But sometimes these relationships are uncertain: a police officer might be faced with a crowd of people, and this situation may or may not suddenly become more volatile and violent. In these latter situations, people are faced with trying to resolve the uncertainty, ideally before any important event occurs. In order to make accurate predictions about what is going to happen, and act upon it, people need to use the information that is available in the environment, as well as their knowledge gained from past experience . The police officer, for example, may need to pay attention to the ages of the people, their gender, the number of people, and the time of the day. Some of these "cues" might be particularly relevant, and learning which ones are important will help them to make better predictions about what it likely to happen. The officer's knowledge about these cues will prove crucial when deciding how to act in this complex environment.This project aims to provide a thorough experimental examination of the way in which the cognitive system copes with different uncertain situations. The starting point for this work is to conceptualise different uncertain situations as either "expected" or "unexpected". Sometimes we can provide a good estimate of the uncertainty we might face (expected uncertainty), but in other cases, the uncertainty occurs out of the blue (unexpected uncertainty). At the moment, psychologists have a very poor understanding of the way in which these very different types of uncertainty affect the basic processes of learning and attention. In this research we will conduct three series of experiments to address this knowledge gap. In Series 1 we will investigate how stimulus processing is affected by uncertainty: do people change the way they look at and attend to stimuli; do they start to neglect stimuli over time; do they fail to commit those stimuli to memory? This will tell us about how the relationship between perceptual and cognitive processing changes in uncertain situations.In Series 2 we will look at how stimuli become bound together in memory during complex uncertain situations. Is it the case that different parts of the environment are treated individually or are they considered more holistically as a consequence of uncertainty? The data will have important implications for understanding how uncertainty changes the content of memory for the world around us. In Series 3 we will look at how relationships between events are learnt during uncertainty: do people need more information in order to become sure about relationships that exist; do sudden changes in the environment make us more aware of future events; does uncertainty affect everything we learn about, or just those stimuli that have been experienced as uncertain?Our current theories of how uncertainty affects learning and attention have been shown to be inadequate to explain the existing published data. The current project will help us to develop a comprehensive set of effects that our models need to explain. The final aim of the project is to use our findings to update existing theories of behaviour. By doing so, we will provide a formal, mathematical theory of how uncertainty affects learning and attention.