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When faced with navigating back somewhere we have been before we might either retrace our steps or seek a shorter path. Both choices have costs. Here, we ask whether it is possible to characterize formally the choice of navigational plans as a bounded rational process that trades off the quality of the plan (e.g., its length) and the cognitive cost required to find and implement it. We analyze the navigation strategies of two groups of people that are firstly trained to follow a "default policy" taking a route in a virtual maze and then asked to navigate to various known goal destinations, either in the way they want ("Go To Goal") or by taking novel shortcuts ("Take Shortcut"). We address these wayfinding problems using InfoRL: an information-theoretic approach that formalizes the cognitive cost of devising a navigational plan, as the informational cost to deviate from a well-learned route (the "default policy"). In InfoRL, optimality refers to finding the best trade-off between route length and the amount of control information required to find it. We report five main findings. First, the navigational strategies automatically identified by InfoRL correspond closely to different routes (optimal or suboptimal) in the virtual reality map, which were annotated by hand in previous research. Second, people deliberate more in places where the value of investing cognitive resources (i.e., relevant goal information) is greater. Third, compared to the group of people who receive the "Go To Goal" instruction, those who receive the "Take Shortcut" instruction find shorter but less optimal solutions, reflecting the intrinsic difficulty of finding optimal shortcuts. Fourth, those who receive the "Go To Goal" instruction modulate flexibly their cognitive resources, depending on the benefits of finding the shortcut. Finally, we found a surprising amount of variability in the choice of navigational strategies and resource investment across participants. Taken together, these results illustrate the benefits of using InfoRL to address navigational planning problems from a bounded rational perspective.

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Emotional concepts and their mental representations have been extensively studied. Yet, some ecologically relevant aspects, such as how they are processed in ambiguous contexts (e.g., in relation to other emotional stimuli that share similar characteristics), are incompletely known. We employed a similarity judgement of emotional concepts and manipulated the contextual congruency of the responses along the two main affective dimensions of hedonic valence and physiological activation, respectively. Behavioural and kinematics (mouse-tracking) measures were combined to gather a novel ‘similarity index’ between emotional concepts, to derive topographical maps of their mental representations. Self-report (interoceptive sensibility, positive–negative affectivity, depression) and physiological measures (heart rate variability, HRV) have been collected to explore their possible association with emotional conceptual representation. Results indicate that emotional concepts typically associated with low arousal profit by contextual congruency, with faster responses and reduced uncertainty when contextual ambiguity decreases. The emotional maps recreate two almost orthogonal axes of valence and arousal, and the similarity measure captures the smooth boundaries between emotions. The emotional map of a subgroup of individuals with low positive affectivity reveals a narrower conceptual distribution, with variations in positive emotions and in individuals with reduced arousal (such as those with reduced HRV). Our work introduces a novel methodology to study emotional conceptual representations, bringing the behavioural dynamics of decision-making processes and choice uncertainty into the affective domain. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences’.

Emotional concepts and their mental representations have been extensively studied. Yet, some ecologically relevant aspects, such as how emotional concepts are processed in ambiguous contexts, are incompletely known. We employed a similarity judgment of emotional concepts and manipulated the contextual congruency along the two main affective dimensions of hedonic valence and physiological activation, respectively. Behavioral and kinematics (mouse-tracking) measures were combined to gather a novel ‘similarity index’ between concepts, to derive topographical maps of their mental representations. Self-report (interoceptive sensibility, positive-negative affectivity, depression) and physiological measures (heart rate variability) have been tested to shape the emotional maps. Results indicate that low arousal concepts profit by contextual congruency, with faster responses and reduced uncertainty when contextual ambiguity decreases. The emotional maps exhibit two almost orthogonal axes of valence and arousal, and the similarity measure captures the smooth boundaries between emotions. The emotional map of individuals with low positive affectivity reveals a narrower conceptual distribution, with variations on positive emotions and on emotions with reduced arousal (as individuals with reduced heart rate variability). In sum, our work introduces a novel methodology for delve conceptual representations, bringing the dynamics of decision-making processes and choice uncertainty into the affective domain.

No abstract

When faced with navigating back somewhere we have been before we might either retrace our steps or seek a shorter path. Both choices have costs. In this study, we ask whether it is possible to characterize formally the choice of navigational plans in terms of a bounded rational process that trades off the quality of the plan (e.g., its length) and the cognitive cost required to find and implement it. We analyze the navigation strategies of two groups of people that are firstly trained to follow a "default policy" taking a route in a virtual maze and then asked to navigate to various known goal destinations, either in the way they want ("Go To Goal") or by taking novel shortcuts ("Take Shortcut"). We address these wayfinding problems using InfoRL: an information-theoretic approach that formalizes the cognitive cost of devising a navigational plan, as the informational cost to deviate from a well-learned route (the "default policy"). In InfoRL, optimality does not refer to finding the shortest route, but to the best trade-off between route length and the amount of control information required to find it. We report four main findings. First, the navigational strategies automatically identified by InfoRL correspond closely to different routes (optimal or suboptimal) in the virtual reality map, which were annotated by hand in previous research. Second, people deliberate more in places where the value of investing cognitive resources (i.e., relevant goal information) is greater. Third, the group of people who receive the "Take Shortcut" find shorter solutions compared to those who receive the "Go To Goal" instruction. However, while the former appear to be naively more efficient if one only considers plan length, our bounded rational approach reveals that they invest more cognitive resources and find overall less optimal solutions, reflecting the intrinsic difficulty of finding optimal shortcuts. While prior analysis indicates greater male optimality in short-cut finding, we find that both male and female participants similarly modulate their cognitive resources in a task-dependent way, as formally expressed through our information-theoretic approach. Finally, we found a surprising amount of variability in the choice of navigational strategies and resource investment across trials. Participants do not simply adopt one strategy and maintain it. Taken together, these results illustrate the benefits of using InfoRL to address navigational planning problems from a bounded rational perspective.