Abstract
Humans routinely formulate plans in domains so complex that even the most powerful computers are taxed. To do so, they seem to avail themselves of many strategies and heuristics that efficiently simplify, approximate, and hierarchically decompose hard tasks into simpler subtasks. Theoretical and cognitive research has revealed several such strategies; however, little is known about their establishment, interaction, and efficiency. Here, we use model-based behavioral analysis to provide a detailed examination of the performance of human subjects in a moderately deep planning task. We find that subjects exploit the structure of the domain to establish subgoals in a way that achieves a nearly maximal reduction in the cost of computing values of choices, but then combine partial searches with greedy local steps to solve subtasks, and maladaptively prune the decision trees of subtasks in a reflexive manner upon encountering salient losses. Subjects come idiosyncratically to favor particular sequences of actions to achieve subgoals, creating novel complex actions or "options."
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3098-3103 |
| Journal | PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences |
| Volume | 112 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| Early online date | 9 Feb 2015 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 10 Mar 2015 |
Keywords
- Humans
- Intelligence
- Planning Techniques
- Stochastic Processes
- Journal Article
- Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
- Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Profiles
-
Paul Faulkner
- School of Psychology - Associate Professor
- Centre for REsearch in Psychological Wellbeing
Person: Academic