Decisions to intervene on causal systems are adaptively selected

How do people choose interventions to learn about a causal system? Here, we tested two possibilities: an optimal infor-mation sampling strategy which aims to discriminate between multiple hypotheses, and a second strategy that aims to confirm individual hypotheses. We show in Experiment 1 that individ-ual behavior is best fit using a mixture of these two options. In a second experiment, we find that people are able to adaptively alter the strategies they use in response to their expected payoff in a particular task environment