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Dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit
Selecting goals and successfully pursuing them in an uncertain and dynamic environment is an important aspect of human behaviour. In order to decide which goal to pursue at what point in time, one has to evaluate the consequences of one’s actions over future time steps by forward planning. However,...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7048318/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32069290 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007685 |
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author | Ott, Florian Marković, Dimitrije Strobel, Alexander Kiebel, Stefan J. |
author_facet | Ott, Florian Marković, Dimitrije Strobel, Alexander Kiebel, Stefan J. |
author_sort | Ott, Florian |
collection | PubMed |
description | Selecting goals and successfully pursuing them in an uncertain and dynamic environment is an important aspect of human behaviour. In order to decide which goal to pursue at what point in time, one has to evaluate the consequences of one’s actions over future time steps by forward planning. However, when the goal is still temporally distant, detailed forward planning can be prohibitively costly. One way to select actions at minimal computational costs is to use heuristics. It is an open question how humans mix heuristics with forward planning to balance computational costs with goal reaching performance. To test a hypothesis about dynamic mixing of heuristics with forward planning, we used a novel stochastic sequential two-goal task. Comparing participants’ decisions with an optimal full planning agent, we found that at the early stages of goal-reaching sequences, in which both goals are temporally distant and planning complexity is high, on average 42% (SD = 19%) of participants’ choices deviated from the agent’s optimal choices. Only towards the end of the sequence, participant’s behaviour converged to near optimal performance. Subsequent model-based analyses showed that participants used heuristic preferences when the goal was temporally distant and switched to forward planning when the goal was close. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7048318 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-70483182020-03-09 Dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit Ott, Florian Marković, Dimitrije Strobel, Alexander Kiebel, Stefan J. PLoS Comput Biol Research Article Selecting goals and successfully pursuing them in an uncertain and dynamic environment is an important aspect of human behaviour. In order to decide which goal to pursue at what point in time, one has to evaluate the consequences of one’s actions over future time steps by forward planning. However, when the goal is still temporally distant, detailed forward planning can be prohibitively costly. One way to select actions at minimal computational costs is to use heuristics. It is an open question how humans mix heuristics with forward planning to balance computational costs with goal reaching performance. To test a hypothesis about dynamic mixing of heuristics with forward planning, we used a novel stochastic sequential two-goal task. Comparing participants’ decisions with an optimal full planning agent, we found that at the early stages of goal-reaching sequences, in which both goals are temporally distant and planning complexity is high, on average 42% (SD = 19%) of participants’ choices deviated from the agent’s optimal choices. Only towards the end of the sequence, participant’s behaviour converged to near optimal performance. Subsequent model-based analyses showed that participants used heuristic preferences when the goal was temporally distant and switched to forward planning when the goal was close. Public Library of Science 2020-02-18 /pmc/articles/PMC7048318/ /pubmed/32069290 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007685 Text en © 2020 Ott et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Ott, Florian Marković, Dimitrije Strobel, Alexander Kiebel, Stefan J. Dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit |
title | Dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit |
title_full | Dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit |
title_fullStr | Dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit |
title_full_unstemmed | Dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit |
title_short | Dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit |
title_sort | dynamic integration of forward planning and heuristic preferences during multiple goal pursuit |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7048318/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32069290 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007685 |
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