Abstract
Ideal decision-makers should constantly assess all sources of information about opportunities and threats, and be able to redetermine their choices promptly in the face of change. However, perpetual monitoring and reassessment impose inordinate sensing and computational costs, making them impractical for animals and machines alike. The obvious alternative of committing for extended periods of time to limited sensory strategies associated with particular courses of action can be dangerous and wasteful. Here, we explore the intermediate possibility of making provisional temporal commitments whilst admitting interruption based on limited broader observation. We simulate foraging under threat of predation to elucidate the benefits of such a scheme. We relate our results to diseases of distractibility and roving attention, and consider mechanistic substrates such as noradrenergic neuromodulation.
Highlights
It might seem optimal for decision-makers to be constantly open to all sources of potential information and to be able to change their course of action at a moment’s notice
We demonstrate the benefits of such a scheme through the example of foraging under predation risk, and propose a simple mechanism for implementing interruption
Even if information is available in principle, limited computational resources mean that only a subset of this information can in practice be subject to enhanced perceptual or central processing
Summary
It might seem optimal for decision-makers to be constantly open to all sources of potential information and to be able to change their course of action at a moment’s notice. Relevant information may not always be accessible when the agent engages in an activity that naturally restricts sensory access. Agents create partially observable environments for themselves, even when those environments could be more fully observable [1]. Even if information is available in principle, limited computational resources mean that only a subset of this information can in practice be subject to enhanced perceptual or central processing. These considerations lead to forms of selective attention [2,3,4]
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