Rationality Enhancement Article 2022

Rational use of cognitive resources in human planning

Making good decisions requires thinking ahead, but the huge number of actions and outcomes one could consider makes exhaustive planning infeasible for computationally constrained agents, such as humans. How people are nevertheless able to solve novel problems when their actions have long-reaching consequences is thus a long-standing question in cognitive science. To address this question, we propose a model of resource-constrained planning that allows us to derive optimal planning strategies. We find that previously proposed heuristics such as best-first search are near-optimal under some circumstances, but not others. In a mouse-tracking paradigm, we show that people adapt their planning strategies accordingly, planning in a manner that is broadly consistent with the optimal model but not with any single heuristic model. We also find systematic deviations from the optimal model that might result from additional cognitive constraints that are yet to be uncovered.

Author(s): Frederick Callaway and Bas van Opheusden and Sayan Gul and Priyam Das and Paul M. Krueger and Thomas L. Griffiths and Falk Lieder
Journal: Nature Human Behaviour
Volume: 6
Pages: 1112--1125
Year: 2022
Month: April
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Article (article)
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01332-8
State: Published
URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01332-8
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive

BibTex

@article{Callaway2021Rational,
  title = {Rational use of cognitive resources in human planning},
  journal = {Nature Human Behaviour},
  abstract = {Making good decisions requires thinking ahead, but the huge number of actions and outcomes one could consider makes exhaustive planning infeasible for computationally constrained agents, such as humans. How people are nevertheless able to solve novel problems when their actions have long-reaching consequences is thus a long-standing question in cognitive science. To address this question, we propose a model of resource-constrained planning that allows us to derive optimal planning strategies. We find that previously proposed heuristics such as best-first search are near-optimal under some circumstances, but not others. In a mouse-tracking paradigm, we show that people adapt their planning strategies accordingly, planning in a manner that is broadly consistent with the optimal model but not with any single heuristic model. We also find systematic deviations from the optimal model that might result from additional cognitive constraints that are yet to be uncovered.},
  volume = {6},
  pages = {1112--1125},
  month = apr,
  year = {2022},
  slug = {callaway2021rational},
  author = {Callaway, Frederick and van Opheusden, Bas and Gul, Sayan and Das, Priyam and Krueger, Paul M. and Griffiths, Thomas L. and Lieder, Falk},
  url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01332-8},
  month_numeric = {4}
}