Date of Award
Winter 12-2022
Additional Affiliations
Brain Behavior and Cognition, Cognitive Computational and Systems Neuroscience Pathway
Degree Name
Master of Arts (AM/MA)
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
When making decisions, we sometimes rely on habit and at other times plan towards goals. Planning requires the construction and use of an internal representation of the environment, a cognitive map. How are these maps constructed, and how do they guide goal-directed decisions? We 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. We found that participants who encoded stronger higher-order relationships among choice options showed increased planning and better performance. These higher-order relationships were more strongly encoded among objects encountered in high-reward contexts, indicating a role for motivation during cognitive map construction. In contrast, lower-order relationships such as simple visual co-occurrence of objects did not predict goal-directed planning. These results show that humans actively construct and use cognitive maps of task structure to make goal-directed decisions
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Dr. Zachariah Reagh
Committee Members
Dr. Wouter Kool, Dr. Jeffrey Zacks
Recommended Citation
Karagoz, Ata, "Construction and Use of Cognitive Maps in Model-Based Control" (2022). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2824.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/2824