Abstract
Author SummaryReasoning, learning, and creativity are hallmarks of human intelligence. These abilities involve the frontal lobe of the brain, but it remains unclear how the frontal lobes function in uncertain or open-ended situations. We propose here a computational model of human executive function that integrates multiple processes during decision-making, such as expectedness of uncertainty, task switching, and reinforcement learning. The model was tested in behavioral experiments and accounts for human decisions and their variations across individuals. The model reveals that executive function is capable of monitoring three or four concurrent behavioral strategies and infers online strategies' ability to predict action outcomes. If one strategy appears to reliably predict action outcomes, then it is chosen and possibly adjusted; otherwise a new strategy is tentatively formed, probed, and chosen instead. Thus, human frontal function has a monitoring capacity limited to three or four behavioral strategies. The results support a model of frontal executive function that explains the role and limitations of human reasoning, learning, and creative abilities in decision-making and adaptive behavior.
Highlights
The ability to adapt to uncertain, changing, and open-ended environments is a hallmark of human intelligence
We considered a variant of the PROBE model that rules out this hypothesis: actions are directly selected by marginalizing over task sets on the basis of task sets’ reliability
We found that the best account of human decisions is the PROBE model combining forward Bayesian inference for evaluating task set reliability and choosing the most reliable actor set and hypothesis-testing for possibly creating new task sets when facing ambiguous or unknown situations
Summary
The ability to adapt to uncertain, changing, and open-ended environments is a hallmark of human intelligence In such natural situations, decision-making involves exploring, adjusting, and exploiting multiple behavioral strategies (i.e., flexible mappings associating stimuli, actions, and expected outcomes [1,2,3,4]). Decision-making involves exploring, adjusting, and exploiting multiple behavioral strategies (i.e., flexible mappings associating stimuli, actions, and expected outcomes [1,2,3,4]) This faculty engages the frontal lobe function that manages task sets— that is, active representations of behavioral strategies stored in long-term memory—for driving action [5,6,7,8,9,10]. Models combining RL and UM suggest that given a fixed collection of concurrent task sets, the frontal function monitors in parallel their relative reliability for adjusting and choosing the most reliable actor [15,16,17]
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