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The Curse of Planning

A. Ross Otto¹; Samuel J. Gershman²; Arthur B. Markman¹; Nathaniel D. Daw³

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin · ² Department of Psychology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University · ³ Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University

A number of accounts of human and animal behavior posit the operation of parallel and competing valuation systems in the control of choice behavior. In these accounts, a flexible but computationally expensive model-based reinforcement-learning system has been contrasted with a less flexible but more efficient model-free reinforcement-learning system. The factors governing which system controls behavior—and under what circumstances—are still unclear. Following the hypothesis that model-based reinforcement learning requires cognitive resources, we demonstrated that having human decision makers perform a demanding secondary task engenders increased reliance on a model-free reinforcement-learning strategy. Further, we showed that, across trials, people negotiate the trade-off between the two systems dynamically as a function of concurrent executive-function demands, and people’s choice latencies reflect the computational expenses of the strategy they employ. These results demonstrate that competition between multiple learning systems can be controlled on a trial-by-trial basis by modulating the availability of cognitive resources.

DOI

10.1177/0956797612463080

Volume

24 (5)

Pages

751-761

Language

en

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Sources

crossref