Humans adaptively delay planning using cognitive maps

Planning is an expensive computational operation that easily exhausts our cognitive resources. For this reason, it is critical to learn strategies to initiate planning wisely. To understand how humans adaptively initiate planning, we developed a task where humans can learn to delay planning at certain timepoints when all actions are equally likely to reach an instructed goal. Across two pre-registered studies, we show that humans adaptively delay planning, and improve in their ability to do so with experience. To explain this behavior, we formalize a model of the underlying meta-control computations. Our model demonstrates how strategies to delay planning are not learned from experienced outcomes, but rather, from searching a cognitive map of the task to determine at which points it is more valuable to delay control. We thus establish that humans can adaptively delay planning, and learn to do so by means of a cognitive map.