Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Current models of cognitive control frame its allocation as a process of expected utility maximization. The benefits of a candidate action are weighed against the costs of that control allocation (e.g. opportunity costs). Recent theorizing has found that it is normative to account for the value of learning when determining control allocation. Here, we sought to test whether learning expectations could explain people's initial control allocation in a standard dot-motion perceptual task. We found that subjects' initial skill level and learning rate in a first block were able to predict their initial willingness to accumulate evidence in a second block, interpreted as a greater control allocation for the task. Our findings support the hypothesis that agents consider the learnability of a task when deciding how much cognitive control to allocate to that task.