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{
    "pk": 27796,
    "title": "On the instrumental value of hypothetical and counterfactual thought",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "People often engage in “offline simulation”, considering what\nwould happen if they performed certain actions in the future,\nor had performed different actions in the past. Prior research\nshows that these simulations are biased towards actions a per-\nson considers to be good—i.e., likely to pay off. We ask\nwhether, and why, this bias might be adaptive. Through com-\nputational experiments we compare five agents who differ only\nin the way they engage in offline simulation, across a variety\nof different environment types. Broadly speaking, our exper-\niments reveal that simulating actions one already regards as\ngood does in fact confer an advantage in downstream decision\nmaking, although this general pattern interacts with features\nof the environment in important ways. We contrast this bias\nwith alternatives such as simulating actions whose outcomes\nare instead uncertain.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Publication-based-Talks",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nf1p85w",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Thomas",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Icard",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Fiery",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Chushman",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Harvard",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2018-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27796/galley/17436/download/"
        }
    ]
}