Resource-rational Task Decomposition to Minimize Planning Costs

Understand

People often plan hierarchically.

• That is, rather than planning over a monolithic representation of a task, they decompose the task into simpler subtasks and then plan to accomplish those.
• Although much work explores how people decompose tasks, there is less analysis of why people decompose tasks in the way they do.
• Here, we address this question by formalizing task decomposition as a resource-rational representation problem.