Topic: Performance-Gated Deliberation

Finding the right amount of deliberation, between insufficient and excessive, is a hard decision-making problem that depends on the value we place on our time. Average reward, putatively encoded by tonic dopamine, serves in existing reinforcement learning (RL) theory as the stationary opportunity cost of time. This cost often varies with context, however, which changes over time. Current RL approaches thus do not efficiently handle task non-stationarity. Yet, the brain's representation of and computation with time's value, including its impact on the neural dynamics of deliberation, must accou