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Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Goal-pursuit strategies in volatile environments

Eleanor Holton¹, Mark K Ho², Yael Niv¹; ¹Princeton University, ²New York University

Presenter: Eleanor Holton

Effective goal pursuit requires balancing commitment against flexibility: focusing on a single goal is cognitively efficient but risks missing better alternatives, especially as environments change. Here, we formalise this trade-off as a problem of state-space selection, asking when committing to and representing a single goal (a goal construal) outperforms tracking all goals (full construal) as a function of environmental volatility. We model goal pursuit in a Pac-Man-inspired task, in which agents navigate a maze to capture ghosts whose reward values evolve as independent Markov chains. Simulations show that the advantage of flexibility (tracking all goals throughout pursuit) follows an inverted-U pattern: full construal is most beneficial at intermediate volatility, while committing to a single goal is favorable when environments are either very stable or very volatile. These results suggest that adaptive goal pursuit will depend jointly on environmental statistics and the cognitive costs of flexibility – generating testable predictions about how humans might adapt goal pursuit strategies across environments.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition