Research Talks and Presentations

Ata Karagoz presents his research at RLDM 2022

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.

To view a full-size version of Ata’s poster, click the thumbnail above.