ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2010
The central executive as a search process: priming exploration and exploitation across domains.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
- Wild canids and felids differ in their reliance on reused travel routeways.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A cognitive multiplex network approach to investigate mental navigation and predict high-level cognition.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Oscillations of the Wandering Mind: Neural Evidence for Distinct Exploration/Exploitation Strategies in Younger and Older Adults.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Self-guided transitions and creative idea search: adaptively choosing flexibility versus persistence in divergent and convergent thinking tasks.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The impact of distribution properties on sampling behavior.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Testing the convergent validity, domain generality, and temporal stability of selected measures of people's tendency to explore.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The journey within: mental navigation as a novel framework for understanding psychotherapeutic transformation.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- How Discrimination Gets Under the Skin: Biological Determinants of Discrimination Associated With Dysregulation of the Brain-Gut Microbiome System and Psychological Symptoms.Biological psychiatry · 2023Article
- Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Visuospatial information foraging describes search behavior in learning latent environmental features.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Humans trade off search costs and accuracy in a combined visual search and perceptual task.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Gotcha: Working memory prioritization from automatic attentional biases.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Review
- Developmental Dyslexia: Disorder or Specialization in Exploration?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Integrated world modeling theory expanded: Implications for the future of consciousness.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2022Article
- Generalized Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (G-SLAM) as unification framework for natural and artificial intelligences: towards reverse engineering the hippocampal/entorhinal system and principles of high-level cognition.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2022Article
- From exploration to exploitation: a shifting mental mode in late life development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
- Priming exploration across domains: does search in a spatial environment influence search in a cognitive environment?Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- The Radically Embodied Conscious Cybernetic Bayesian Brain: From Free Energy to Free Will and Back Again.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The exploration-exploitation trade-off in a foraging task is affected by mood-related arousal and valence.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is common to a wide variety of problems involving search in space and mind. The prevalence of this trade-off and its neurological underpinnings led us to propose domain-general cognitive search processes (Hills, Todd, & Goldstone, 2008). We propose further that these are consistent with the idea of a central executive search process that combines goal-handling across subgoal hierarchies. In the present study, we investigate 3 aspects of this proposal. First, the existence of a unitary central executive search process should allow priming from 1 search task to another and at multiple hierarchical levels. We confirm this by showing cross-domain priming from a spatial search task to 2 different cognitive levels within a lexical search task. Second, given the neural basis of the proposed generalized cognitive search process and the evidence that the central executive is primarily engaged during complex tasks, we hypothesize that priming should require search in the sense of a self-regulated making and testing of sequential predictions about the world. This was confirmed by showing that when participants were allowed to collect spatial resources without searching for them, no priming occurred. Finally, we provide a mechanism for the underlying search process and investigate 3 alternative hypotheses for subgoal hierarchies using the central executive as a search process model (CESP). CESP envisions the central executive as having both emergent and unitary processes, with one of its roles being a generalized cognitive search process that navigates goal hierarchies by mediating persistence on and switching between subgoals.
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