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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 16, 2025

Problem-Solving Before Instruction PS-I: A Protocol for Assessment and Intervention in Students with Different Abilities

Problem-Solving Before Instruction PS-I: A Protocol for Assessment and Intervention in Students with Different Abilities

Published on: September 11, 2021

A goal-centric outlook on learning.

Gaia Molinaro¹, Anne G E Collins²

¹Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

|September 11, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Goals fundamentally shape learning and decision-making by influencing how we perceive information, actions, and outcomes. Understanding goal selection is key to advancing computational theories of learning in both humans and AI.

Keywords:

abstraction computational modeling decision-making goals learning motivation reinforcement learning rewards

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Computational Neuroscience
Artificial Intelligence

Background:

Computational models of learning often treat goals as fixed inputs.
Empirical evidence suggests goals significantly impact cognitive processes.

Purpose of the Study:

To review how goals influence learning and decision-making.
To highlight the importance of studying goal selection in cognitive theories.
To propose a goal-centric framework for understanding learning.

Main Methods:

Literature review of empirical findings on goal-directed cognition.
Synthesis of research on goal value attribution and exploration strategies.
Framing goal selection within a hierarchical decision-making context.

Main Results:

Goals shape representations of inputs, actions, and outcomes.
Goal setting critically influences states, actions, and rewards in learning.
Principles of goal value attribution and exploration are synthesized.

Conclusions:

Studying goal selection is crucial for advancing learning theories.
A goal-centric perspective offers a more complete understanding of learning in biological and artificial agents.