Cargando…

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,...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ott, Florian, Marković, Dimitrije, Strobel, Alexander, Kiebel, Stefan J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
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
_version_ 1783502278889570304
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
work_keys_str_mv AT ottflorian dynamicintegrationofforwardplanningandheuristicpreferencesduringmultiplegoalpursuit
AT markovicdimitrije dynamicintegrationofforwardplanningandheuristicpreferencesduringmultiplegoalpursuit
AT strobelalexander dynamicintegrationofforwardplanningandheuristicpreferencesduringmultiplegoalpursuit
AT kiebelstefanj dynamicintegrationofforwardplanningandheuristicpreferencesduringmultiplegoalpursuit