Reaching Into the Unknown: Actions, Goal Hierarchies, and Explorative Agency.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience
• Philosophy of Action

Background:

• Action is often viewed teleologically, focusing on pursuing predefined goals via exploitation.
• Recent theories highlight exploration: discovering new goals or strategies.
• The distinction between exploitation and exploration raises questions about agency and goal-directedness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a framework for understanding exploration within goal-directed action.
• To reconcile exploration with existing models of agency.
• To clarify the role of hierarchical goal structures in distinguishing exploitation and exploration.

Main Methods:

• Theoretical analysis of goal-directed action and agency.
• Examination of the exploitation-exploration distinction.
• Conceptual integration of hierarchical goal structures.

Main Results:

• Exploration is not goal-free; it operates within a hierarchical goal structure.
• Exploitative action uses existing associations between low-level and high-level goal states.
• Explorative action involves control over low-level states to pursue indeterminate high-level goals, enabling new goal acquisition and hierarchy reorganization.

Conclusions:

• A hierarchical view of goals is essential for a unified account of exploitative and explorative action.
• Exploration is characterized by the capacity to control proximal (low-level) states, facilitating the pursuit of novel or reorganized distal (high-level) goals.
• Dominant models of agency need to accommodate the capacity for explorative action.