Learning, Generalization and the Perception of Information: an Experimental Study

Marco Novarese (), Alessandro Lanteri () and Cesare Tibaldeschi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This article experimentally explores the way in which human agents learn how to process and manage new information. In an abstract setting, players should perform an everyday task: selecting information, making generalizations, distinguishing contexts. The tendency to generalize is common to all participants, but in a different way. Best players have a stringer tendency to generalise rules. A high score is, in fact, associated with low entropy for mistakes, that is with a tendency to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Though the repetition of mistakes might be considered a failure to properly employ feedback or a bias, it may instead turn out as a viable and successful procedure. This result is connected to the literature on learning.

Keywords: behavioural entropy; cognitive economics; complexity; experiments; feedback; heuristics; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 D83 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-neu
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/28007/ original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:28007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Address: Schackstr. 4, D-80539 Munich, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ekkehart Schlicht ().