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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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.

We humans are capable of solving challenging planning problems, but the range of adaptive strategies that we use to address them are not yet fully characterized. Here, we designed a series of problem-solving tasks that require planning at different depths. After systematically comparing the performance of participants and AI planners, we found that when facing manageable problems that require planning to a certain number of subgoals (from 1 to 6), participants make an adaptive use of their cognitive resources - namely, they tend to select an initial plan having the minimum required depth, rather than selecting the same depth for all problems. When facing more challenging problems that require planning up to 7 or 8 subgoals, participants tend to select a simpler (greedy) strategy wherein plans consider only the next 1 or 2 subgoals. Furthermore, we found a strong similarity between how different participants solve the same problems. These results support the view of problem solving as a bounded rational process, which adapts costly cognitive resources to task demands.

Psychology and neuroscience are concerned with the study of behavior, of internal cognitive processes, and their neural foundations. However, most laboratory studies use constrained experimental settings that greatly limit the range of behaviors that can be expressed. While focusing on restricted settings ensures methodological control, it risks impoverishing the object of study: by restricting behavior, we might miss key aspects of cognitive and neural function. In this article, we argue that psychology and neuroscience should increasingly adopt innovative experimental designs, measurement methods, analysis techniques and sophisticated computational models to probe rich, ecologically valid forms of behavior, including social behavior. We discuss the challenges of studying rich forms of behavior as well as the novel opportunities offered by state-of-the-art methodologies and new sensing technologies, and we highlight the importance of developing sophisticated formal models. We exemplify our arguments by reviewing some recent streams of research in psychology, neuroscience and other fields (e.g., sports analytics, ethology and robotics) that have addressed rich forms of behavior in a model-based manner. We hope that these "success cases" will encourage psychologists and neuroscientists to extend their toolbox of techniques with sophisticated behavioral models – and to use them to study rich forms of behavior as well as the cognitive and neural processes that they engage.