Alicia Izquierdo, Ph.D.Impulsivity can be advantageous in “unexpectedly uncertain” environments https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010873
Environmental uncertainty and the advantage of impulsive choice strategies
Author summary Impulsive choice behavior, or valuing immediate smaller rewards over larger, delayed rewards, is typically considered to be detrimental in decision-making. In this study, we use Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to demonstrate that impulsive choices can be beneficial in three common decision-making tasks: Temporal Discounting, Information Sampling and an Explore-Exploit task. Specifically, we found that when a task environment is more uncertain than expected, an impulsive agent can collect more average reward than a non-impulsive agent. Our work suggests that impulsivity is not inherently negative. Valuing immediate rewards over delayed rewards can be an adaptive strategy when faced with uncertainty.
Joe Katz
Lucas Pinto
George Takei 
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