A resource-rational analysis of human planning

Abstract

People’s cognitive strategies are jointly shaped by function and\ncomputational constraints. Resource-rational analysis lever-\nages these constraints to derive rational models of people’s\ncognitive strategies from the assumption that people make\nrational use of limited cognitive resources. We present a\nresource-rational analysis of planning and evaluate its predic-\ntions in a newly developed process tracing paradigm. In Ex-\nperiment 1, we find that a resource-rational planning strategy\npredicts the process by which people plan more accurately than\nprevious models of planning. Furthermore, in Experiment 2,\nwe find that it also captures how people’s planning strategies\nadapt to the structure of the environment. In addition, our ap-\nproach allows us to quantify for the first time how close peo-\nple’s planning strategies are to being resource-rational and to\ncharacterize in which ways they conform to and deviate from\noptimal planning.