Visuospatial attention guides simplified mental representations for planning

Human planning is efficient—it frugally deploys limited cognitive resources to accomplish difficult tasks. Computational approaches to human planning propose that people construct simplified mental representations of their environment, known as value-guided construals (VGC), for efficiency. This normative model, however, does not consider the perceptual and attentional mechanisms governing how people plan. I will discuss recent findings which demonstrate that visuospatial attention controls which aspects of a task representation enter subjective awareness and are available for planning. In a maze navigation task, participants reported which items they were aware of while planning. Participants’ mental representations were influenced by spatial attention, an effect not predicted by the value-guided construal process. For example, mazes whose task-relevant items are lateralized to one hemifield are more easily represented by participants. These visuospatial attention findings extend to offline plans, where participants were required to plan exclusively based on their imaginations. Together, this work bridges computational perspectives on perception and decision-making to better understand how individuals represent their environments in aid of planning. These findings will help guide future research on how human-like planning may be implemented in artificial systems