Can We Learn to Think Further Ahead?

Chess grandmasters are often held up as the epitome of thinking far ahead. But can others, with a modest amount of practice, learn to think further ahead?

In addressing this question, a team of cognitive scientists has created a computational model that reveals our ability to plan for future events. The work enhances our understanding of the factors that affect decision-making and shows how we can boost our planning skills through practice.

The research, conducted by scientists in New York University’s Center for Neural Science and reported in the journal Nature, centers on the role of “planning depth”—the number of steps that an individual thinks ahead—in decision-making.

“While artificial intelligence has made impressive progress in solving complex planning problems, much less is understood about the nature and depth of planning in people,” explains Wei Ji Ma, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at NYU and the paper’s senior author. “Our work adds to this body of knowledge by showing that even a relatively modest amount of practice can improve depth of planning.”

It’s been long established that a hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to plan multiple steps into the future. However, it’s less clear whether or not skilled decision makers plan more steps ahead than do novices. This is because methods for measuring this aptitude (e.g., experiments involving board games) have notable shortcomings—in part, because they don’t reliably estimate planning depth.

The Nature paper’s authors had people play a relatively simple game—a more sophisticated version of tic-tac-toe—that still required players to plan deeply (i.e., multiple steps ahead). Then, to understand precisely what goes on in people’s minds as they are thinking of their next move in this game, the authors designed a computer model based on AI principles. The model allows them to describe and subsequently predict the moves that people make when faced with new situations in the game.

“In this computational model, players build a ‘decision tree’ in their heads the same way that you might plan for multiple possible scenarios for a complex travel itinerary,” Ma explains.

Here, their calculations showed that human behavior can be captured using a computational cognitive model based on a heuristic search algorithm—one that maps out a sequence of promising moves for both players.