Gautam Agarwal
Champalimaud Neuroscience Program, Portugal

A planning game reveals distributed patterning in player behavior

Wednesday 08th of February 2017 at 12:00pm
560 Evans

Decision-making has been modeled in great detail based on 2-alternative choice (2AC) tasks; however it remains unclear how these models apply to more naturalistic settings, where choices can have long-term and diverse consequences. In turn, quantitatively modeling more complex decisions poses a challenge, requiring adequate sampling of behavior over a larger state space. To address this problem, we have developed a video game in which subjects can flexibly solve multi-step planning problems that have identifiable optimal solutions. In this game, subjects must plan a path that allows them to collect multiple growing objects at appropriate times in the future. By parametrically varying the number and spatio-temporal arrangement of targets, we densely sample the stimulus space. In parallel, we densely sample behavior by monitoring subjects’ actions and physiology. Each subject develops a highly patterned, yet unique, approach to game play apparent across all measured signals. While some of these signals can be interpreted directly with respect to game play (e.g. button presses), others are indicative of the subjects’ internal state as they solve the task (e.g. pupil size, button pressure). We now seek to combine these two types of measures to understand how subjects efficiently form and update plans.
(video)

Join Email List

You can subscribe to our weekly seminar email list by sending an email to majordomo@lists.berkeley.edu that contains the words subscribe redwood in the body of the message.
(Note: The subject line can be arbitrary and will be ignored)