Performance-gated deliberation: A context-adapted strategy in which urgency is opportunity cost.

ABSTRACT: Finding the right amount of deliberation, between insufficient and excessive, is a hard decision making problem that depends on the value we place on our time. Average-reward, putatively encoded by tonic dopamine, serves in existing reinforcement learning theory as the opportunity cost of time, including deliberation time. Importantly, this cost can itself vary with the environmental context and is not trivial to estimate. Here, we propose how the opportunity cost of deliberation can be estimated adaptively on multiple timescales to account for non-stationary contextual factors. We use it in a simple decision-making heuristic based on average-reward reinforcement learning (AR-RL) that we call Performance-Gated Deliberation (PGD). We propose PGD as a strategy used by animals wherein deliber

SUBMITTER: Puelma Touzel M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9176815 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature