Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Goal pursuit profoundly shapes human cognition. This is often beneficial – for example, by focusing information processing. However, goal-dependent computations occasionally lead to seemingly maladaptive behavior, such as a bias toward goal persistence – the tendency to continue pursuing the current goal even when suboptimal. While various psychological explanations have been proposed for goal persistence, the underlying cognitive mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we explore one potential hypothesis. We posit that switching goals incurs the computational cost of reconfiguring internal representations, e.g., to new stimulus-action mappings, and that this cost motivates persisting in a goal even when another is more valuable. Thus, we predict that 1) higher reconfiguration costs will increase persistence bias, and 2) given the choice, participants will prefer switching to lower-cost goals. To test these predictions, we developed a task where participants chose between competing goals, and sudden changes in the task dynamics encouraged goal abandonment toward more valuable options. Crucially, some goals shared the same action selection rule, while others required different rules, allowing us to test how similar vs. different internal representations influenced goal persistence. Across two experiments (N = 125), we replicated goal persistence biases and found that stimulus-action representation switch costs influence both goal persistence and selection preferences. However, they only accounted for a small part of the total goal persistence, suggesting that such biases are predominantly driven by other factors.