title: Conceptual representations in goal-directed decision making.
abstract: Emerging evidence suggests that the long-established distinction between habit-based and goal-directed decision-making mechanisms can also be sustained in humans. Although the habit-based system has been extensively studied in humans, the goal-directed system is less well characterized. This review brings to that task the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual representational mechanisms. Conceptual representations are structured out of semantic constituents (concepts)--the use of which requires an ability to perform some language-like syntactic processing. Decision making--as investigated by neuroscience and psychology--is normally studied in isolation from questions about concepts as studied in philosophy and cognitive psychology. We ask what role concepts play in the "goal-directed" decision-making system. We argue that one fruitful way of studying this system in humans is to investigate the extent to which it deploys conceptual representations.
authors.affiliation: University of Oxford, Oxford, England. nicholas.shea@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
authors.forename: Nicholas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Shea
authors.forename: Kristine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Krug
authors.forename: Philippe N
authors.initials: PN
authors.lastname: Tobler
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003210:Concept Formation; D003657:Decision Making; D006040:Goals; D006184:Habits; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D051381:Rats; D012660:Semantics