Topic: Expected Value of Control

Animals constantly decide how to allocate mental resources to thrive in their environments. Managing learning is a key challenge, and recent experiments show that animals often incur attentional costs for the potential of greater future rewards, or disengage when a task appears unlearnable, exhibiting nuanced cognitive control over learning. However, optimizing time-dependent control requires complex computations, including integrating an agent's learning dynamics and predicting how control affects future rewards. Here, we present a solution for optimal control of integrated non-linear learnin