Mateo Tošić - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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Papers by Mateo Tošić

Computational Brain & Behavior

Teaching people clever heuristics is a promising approach to improve decision-making under uncert... more Teaching people clever heuristics is a promising approach to improve decision-making under uncertainty. The theory of resource rationality makes it possible to leverage machine learning to discover optimal heuristics automatically. One bottleneck of this approach is that the resulting decision strategies are only as good as the model of the decision problem that the machine learning methods were applied to. This is problematic because even domain experts cannot give complete and fully accurate descriptions of the decisions they face. To address this problem, we develop strategy discovery methods that are robust to potential inaccuracies in the description of the scenarios in which people will use the discovered decision strategies. The basic idea is to derive the strategy that will perform best in expectation across all possible real-world problems that could have given rise to the likely erroneous description that a domain expert provided. To achieve this, our method uses a probabi...

2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 2019

Goals are essential to human cognition and behavior. But how do we pursue them? To address this q... more Goals are essential to human cognition and behavior. But how do we pursue them? To address this question, we model how capacity limits on planning and attention shape the computational mechanisms of human goal pursuit. We test the predictions of a simple model based on previous theories in a behavioral experiment. The results show that to fully capture how people pursue their goals it is critical to account for people's limited attention in addition to their limited planning. Our findings elucidate the cognitive constraints that shape human goal pursuit and point to an improved model of human goal pursuit that can reliably predict which goals a person will achieve and which goals they will struggle to pursue effectively.

Topics in Cognitive Science, 2021

Goal-directed behaviour is a deeply important part of human psychology. People constantly set goa... more Goal-directed behaviour is a deeply important part of human psychology. People constantly set goals for themselves and pursue them in many domains of life. In this paper, we develop computational models that characterize how humans pursue goals in a complex dynamic environment and test how well they describe human behaviour in an experiment. Our models are motivated by the principle of resource rationality and draw upon psychological insights about people's limited attention and planning capacities. We found that human goal pursuit is qualitatively different and substantially less efficient than optimal goal pursuit. Models of goal pursuit based on the principle of resource rationality captured human behavior better than both a model of optimal goal pursuit and heuristics that are not resourcerational. We conclude that human goal pursuit is jointly shaped by its function, the structure of the environment, and cognitive costs and constraints on human planning and attention. Our findings are an important step toward understanding humans goal pursuit, as cognitive limitations play a crucial role in shaping people's goal-directed behaviour.