Control of mental representations in human planning
  One of the most striking features of human cognition is the capacity to plan.
Two aspects of human planning stand out: its efficiency, even in complex
environments, and its flexibility, even in changing environments. Efficiency is
especially impressive because directly computing an optimal plan is
intractable, even for modestly complex tasks, and yet people successfully solve
myriad everyday problems despite limited cognitive resources. Standard accounts
in psychology, economics, and artificial intelligence have suggested this is
because people have a mental representation of a task and then use heuristics
to plan in that representation. However, this approach generally assumes that
mental representations are fixed. Here, we propose that mental representations
can be controlled and that this provides opportunities to adaptively simplify
problems so they can be more easily reasoned about -- a process we refer to as
construal. We construct a formal model of this process and, in a series of
large, pre-registered behavioral experiments, show both that construal is
subject to online cognitive control and that people form value-guided
construals that optimally balance the complexity of a representation and its
utility for planning and acting. These results demonstrate how strategically
perceiving and conceiving problems facilitates the effective use of limited
cognitive resources.
