Complex Memory Lab graduate student Ata Karagoz recently traveled to Providence, RI to share his research at the Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM). In collaboration with Wouter Kool, Ata sought to examine how we construct cognitive maps of a given task and how we use these maps to guide goal-directed decisions. He coupled a sequential decision-making task with a behavioral representational similarity analysis approach to examine how relationships between choice options change when people build a cognitive map of the task structure.
Ata found that abstract representations that reflected higher-order relationships among items encountered in the task were associated with increased planning and better performance. In contrast, lower-order relationships such as simple visual co-occurrence of objects did not predict goal-directed planning. He also found that higher-order relationships were more strongly encoded among items associated with higher reward, indicating a role for motivation during cognitive map construction. Ata’s results show that humans actively construct and use cognitive maps of task structure to make goal-directed decisions.