Testing Computational Models of Goal Pursuit

2019

Conference Paper

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Goals are essential to human cognition and behavior. But how do we pursue them? To address this question, we model how capacity limits on planning and attention shape the computational mechanisms of human goal pursuit. We test the predictions of a simple model based on previous theories in a behavioral experiment. The results show that to fully capture how people pursue their goals it is critical to account for people’s limited attention in addition to their limited planning. Our findings elucidate the cognitive constraints that shape human goal pursuit and point to an improved model of human goal pursuit that can reliably predict which goals a person will achieve and which goals they will struggle to pursue effectively.

@conference{Mohnert2019CCN,
  title = {Testing Computational Models of Goal Pursuit},
  author = {Mohnert, Florian and Tosic, Mateo and Lieder, Falk},
  booktitle = {2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience,},
  month = sep,
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.32470/CCN.2019.1350-0},
  url = {https://ccneuro.org/2019/proceedings/0001095.pdf},
  month_numeric = {9}
}