Active inference in concept induction

People are active information gatherers, constantly experimenting and seeking information relevant to their goals. A reasonable approach to active information gathering is to ask questions and conduct experiments that maximize the expected information gain, given current beliefs (Lindley, 1956; Good, 1966; MacKay, 1992). In this paper we compare the behavior of human subjects with that of an optimal information-gathering agent (infomax) in a concept induction task (Tenenbaum, 1999, 2000). Results show high consistency between subjects in their choices of numbers to sample. However infomax generally fails to predict subjects' sampling behavior. It is unclear at this time whether the failure of infomax to predict human behavior is due to problems with Tenenbaum's concept induction model, or due to the fact that subjects use suboptimal heuristics (e.g., confirmatory sampling).