{"pk":49911,"title":"Naturalistic action sampling as foraging in the option space","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Human decision-making involves navigating unbounded spaces of possible goals, subgoals, and action sequences. Yet, computational models typically assume pre-defined option sets. This creates a critical gap between the algorithms developed in cognitive science research on decision-making and the open nature of real-world decisions. We propose that option generation in open-ended settings operates as a search through structured decision space. Drawing on foraging theory, we hypothesized that option generation follows Lévy flight distributions, a pattern observed in both spatial foraging and memory retrieval. We found that the inter-generation time between consecutive responses in open-ended option generation problems approximated a Lévy distribution, while semantic distances demonstrated properties of heavy-tailed distributions. These findings reveal connections between action planning, information search, and memory retrieval, suggesting shared computational principles in how humans explore unbounded decision spaces.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Decision making; Evolution; Memory; Natural Language Processing; Semantic memory; Knowledge representation; Statistics"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4g3827v6","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Dracheva","name_suffix":"","institution":"Dartmouth College","department":""},{"first_name":"Jonathan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Phillips","name_suffix":"","institution":"Dartmouth College","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49911/galley/37873/download/"}]}