ArticlePLoS computational biology2023
Humans decompose tasks by trading off utility and computational cost.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Learning to select computations in recurrent neural circuits.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- On the limit: Working memory capacity constrains learning of complex visuomotor mappings.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A multimodal tableware system for supporting mindful eating in solo dining: a pilot study.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
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- Planning to be incremental: Scene descriptions reveal meaningful clustering in language production.Cognition · 2026Article
- The adaptive tasks and trade-offs that drive the human value system.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Learning to Move and Plan like the Knight: Sequential Decision Making with a Novel Motor Mapping.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Humans Select Subgoals That Balance Immediate and Future Cognitive Costs During Physical Assembly.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Language-Invariant Strategies of Navigating Transitions in Joint Activities: Forms and Functions of Coordination Markers.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Schemas, reinforcement learning and the medial prefrontal cortex.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Expert navigators deploy rational complexity-based decision precaching for large-scale real-world planning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Learning to Decompose: Human-Like Subgoal Preferences Emerge in Neural Networks Learning Graph Traversal.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Approximate planning in spatial search.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Replay shapes abstract cognitive maps for efficient social navigation.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- The successor representation subserves hierarchical abstraction for goal-directed behavior.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Backward reasoning through AND/OR trees to solve problems.CogSci ... Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society (U.S.). Conference · 2024Article
- Importance of prefrontal meta control in human-like reinforcement learning.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2022Review
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Human behavior emerges from planning over elaborate decompositions of tasks into goals, subgoals, and low-level actions. How are these decompositions created and used? Here, we propose and evaluate a normative framework for task decomposition based on the simple idea that people decompose tasks to reduce the overall cost of planning while maintaining task performance. Analyzing 11,117 distinct graph-structured planning tasks, we find that our framework justifies several existing heuristics for task decomposition and makes predictions that can be distinguished from two alternative normative accounts. We report a behavioral study of task decomposition (N = 806) that uses 30 randomly sampled graphs, a larger and more diverse set than that of any previous behavioral study on this topic. We find that human responses are more consistent with our framework for task decomposition than alternative normative accounts and are most consistent with a heuristic-betweenness centrality-that is justified by our approach. Taken together, our results suggest the computational cost of planning is a key principle guiding the intelligent structuring of goal-directed behavior.
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