The construction and use of cognitive maps in model-based control.

Abstract

When making decisions, we sometimes rely on habit and at other times plan toward 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 the construction of cognitive maps is an active process, with motivation dictating the degree to which higher-order relationships are encoded and used for planning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).