Emotion, entropy evaluations and subjective uncertainty

Abstract

A variety of conceptualizations of psychological uncertaintyexist. From an information-theoretic perspective, probabilistic uncertainty can be formalized as mathematical entropy. Cognitive emotion theories posit that uncertainty appraisals and motivation to reduce uncertainty are modulated by emotional state. Yet little is known about how people evaluate probabilistic uncertainty, and about how emotional state modulates people’s evaluations of probabilistic uncertainty and behavior to reduce probabilistic uncertainty. We tested intuitive entropyevaluations and entropy reduction strategies across four emotion conditions in the Entropy Mastermind game. We used the unified Sharma-Mittal space of entropy measures to quantify participants’ entropy evaluations. Results suggest that many people use a heuristic strategy, focusing on the number of possible outcomes, irrespective of the probabilities in the probability distribution. This result is surprising, given that previous work suggested that people are very sensitive to the maximum probability when choosing queries on probabilistic classification tasks. Emotion induction generally increased participants’heuristic assessment. The uncertainty associated with emotional states also affected game play: participants needed fewer queries and spent less time on games in high-uncertainty than in low-uncertainty emotional states. Yet entropy perceptions were not related to subjectively reported uncertainty, numeracy or entropy knowledge, suggesting that entropy perceptions may form an independent psychological construct.

Digital Learning Games for Mathematics and Computer Science Education: The Need for Preregistered RCTs, Standardized Methodology, and Advanced Technology

“…First studies using Entropy Mastermind in educational contexts have been conducted: these include the development and implementation of a roadmap for an instructional unit aimed at fostering elementary students’ intuitions about entropy using a non-digital version of Entropy Mastermind (Özel et al, n.d., submitted). Based on insights from this first study, a digital version of Entropy Mastermind was developed ( Figure 1 ), and first pilot studies conducted using this digital version of the game ( Bertram et al, 2019 ; Schulz et al, 2019 ; Bertram et al, 2020 ). Yet, further research is needed to evaluate the effect of playing Entropy Mastermind on entropy intuitions, knowledge about probabilities, and learning-related psychological variables, and to further validate the developed test items for assessing entropy intuitions.…”

Increased Anxiety is Associated with Better Learning from Negative Feedback

“…The OED hypothesis would be that the learner has specific hypotheses in learning and is trying to figure out which hypothesis is correct during the learning process (Coenen et al., 2018). Given better models of individual learners, that incorporate information about their trait and incidental emotional characteristics, and how those characteristics influence their probability perceptions (see Bertram et al., 2020) and goals, it may be possible to better design individually adaptive tutoring systems (Bertram, in press).…”

Uncertainty quantification and exploration–exploitation trade-off in humans

“…Cognitive theories of emotion define uncertainty as a cognitive component characterizing emotional states. Finally, when humans' decisions are analysed, there is still another relevant lack in mathematical methods for uncertainty quantification as recently demonstrated in (Schultz et al, 2019) and (Bertram et al, 2020), which have investigated the role of emotion in judgment, risk assessment, and decision making under uncertainty and the different kinds of entropy which can be used to quantify uncertainty in the Sharma-Mittal space of entropy measures. Emotional states are significantly connected with subjective uncertainty estimation.…”

“…This distinction is critically important because the two families relate to different quantifications of the uncertaintyas discussed later in the paperwhich has been proved to be a key concept also in theories of cognition and emotion (Gershman, 2019). A recent contribution (Bertram et al, 2020) investigates the relationship between entropy and the emotional state and the perception of uncertainty.…”