Neural Mechanisms of Hierarchical Planning in a Virtual Subway Network.

ABSTRACT: Planning allows actions to be structured in pursuit of a future goal. However, in natural environments, planning over multiple possible future states incurs prohibitive computational costs. To represent plans efficiently, states can be clustered hierarchically into "contexts". For example, representing a journey through a subway network as a succession of individual states (stations) is more costly than encoding a sequence of contexts (lines) and context switches (line changes). Here, using functional brain imaging, we asked humans to perform a planning task in a virtual subway network. Behavioral analyses revealed that humans executed a hierarchically organized plan. Brain activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and premotor cortex scaled with the cost of hierarchical plan represent

SUBMITTER: Balaguer J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4882377 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature