Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Even when we are not faced with any decision, we sometimesengage in offline cognition where we simulate various possi-ble actions we can take. In these instances, which options dowe tend to simulate? Computational models have suggestedthat it is better to focus our limited cognitive resources to-wards simulating and refining our representations of optionsthat appear, at first blush, to have higher values. Two exper-imental studies explore whether we use this strategy. Partic-ipants went through an ‘offline’ thinking phase, and an ‘on-line’ decision-making phase. Participants first freely viewedvarious options, which they had to simulate to determine theiractual values. They were later asked to decide between goodor bad options. Offline simulation produced faster online re-sponse times for the options that appeared to have highervalues, indicating a pre-computation benefit for these items.These results suggest that people focus their offline cognitionon the apparently good.