CBB Seminar | Social Seminar ~ Shuze Liu, Harvard University

CBB SEMINAR ~ 

Shuze Liu Gershman Lab and Kempner Graduate Fellow< Harvard University

Title: Policy compression and the metacognitive control of context sensitivity

Abstract: Human decisions often demand tailoring actions to the current context, but such context-sensitivity is costly. The policy compression framework formalizes these costs by treating policy complexity—the mutual information between states and actions—as a limited cognitive resource. In this talk, I will present two studies applying and extending this resource-rational framework. In Study 1, we show how the time and mental costs of policy complexity naturally encourage speed-accuracy trade-offs and set-size effects, with experiments demonstrating that humans flexibly adapt their policy complexity depending on task demands. In Study 2, we examine how policy complexity interacts with action consideration sets, unifying two cognitive constraints on decision-making. Behavioral experiments reveal that humans strategically regulate both dimensions, highlighting metacognitive reasoning and spontaneous problem simplification even in simple tasks. Together, these studies establish policy complexity as a domain-general formulation of cognitive resources, and illuminate how people adaptively balance accuracy, efficiency, and cognitive effort.