Decision as navigation
Abstract
Understanding choice requires explaining how the brain represents decision-relevant information and uses it to guide behaviour. Research on value-based decision-making has traditionally framed choice as assigning and comparing values, yielding significant insights into its neural basis. However, it has said less about how the structure of decision problems is represented and used during deliberation, particularly when relations between options must be inferred or reused across decision problems. Here, we review evidence suggesting that, in such choices, decision-relevant attributes are assembled into a cognitive map. In this map, options are represented as locations in a metric space, and choice can be framed as navigation. This may allow the brain to compute vector-like relations between options and reuse them across decision problems to support value comparison. By linking neuroeconomics and spatial navigation research, this framework generates testable predictions about how the brain organises and uses structured knowledge for choice.
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BibTeX
@misc{veselic2026decision,
title = {{Decision as navigation}},
author = {Sebastijan Veselic and Elena Gutierrez and Timothy Muller and Erie Boorman and Daniel Shani and Ferran Junoy-Bosch and Carl Lindersson and Sven Petersen and Janahan Selvanayagam and Steven Kennerley},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/5pztq_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5pztq_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Decision as navigation
AU - Sebastijan Veselic
AU - Elena Gutierrez
AU - Timothy Muller
AU - Erie Boorman
AU - Daniel Shani
AU - Ferran Junoy-Bosch
AU - Carl Lindersson
AU - Sven Petersen
AU - Janahan Selvanayagam
AU - Steven Kennerley
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/5pztq_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5pztq_v1/
AB - Understanding choice requires explaining how the brain represents decision-relevant information and uses it to guide behaviour. Research on value-based decision-making has traditionally framed choice as assigning and comparing values, yielding significant insights into its neural basis. However, it has said less about how the structure of decision problems is represented and used during deliberation, particularly when relations between options must be inferred or reused across decision problems. Here, we review evidence suggesting that, in such choices, decision-relevant attributes are assembled into a cognitive map. In this map, options are represented as locations in a metric space, and choice can be framed as navigation. This may allow the brain to compute vector-like relations between options and reuse them across decision problems to support value comparison. By linking neuroeconomics and spatial navigation research, this framework generates testable predictions about how the brain organises and uses structured knowledge for choice.
ER -