  Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how
humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an
information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between
exploration by repeated steps in the search space vs. exploitation, using the
resources encountered. We conjecture that this tradeoff characterizes how a
user deals with uncertainty and its two aspects, risk and ambiguity in economic
theory. Risk is related to the perceived quality of the actually visited patch
of information, and can be reduced by exploiting and understanding the patch to
a better extent. Ambiguity, on the other hand, is the opportunity cost of
having higher quality patches elsewhere in the search space. The aforementioned
tradeoff depends on many attributes, including traits of the user: at the two
extreme ends of the spectrum, analytic and wholistic searchers employ entirely
different strategies. The former type focuses on exploitation first,
interspersed with bouts of exploration, whereas the latter type prefers to
explore the search space first and consume later. Based on an eye-tracking
study of experts' interactions with novel search interfaces in the biomedical
domain, we demonstrate that perceived risk shifts the balance between
exploration and exploitation in either type of users, tilting it against vs. in
favour of ambiguity minimization. Since the pattern of behaviour in information
foraging is quintessentially sequential, risk and ambiguity minimization cannot
happen simultaneously, leading to a fundamental limit on how good such a
tradeoff can be. This in turn connects information seeking with the emergent
field of quantum decision theory.
