Multi-Step Planning In The Brain

Decisions in the natural world are rarely made in isolation. Each action that an organism selects will affect the future situations in which it finds itself, and those situations will in turn affect the future actions that are available. Achieving real-world goals often requires successfully navigating a sequence of many actions. An efficient and flexible way to achieve such goals is to construct an internal model of the environment, and use it to plan behavior multiple steps into the future. This process is known as multi-step planning, and its neural mechanisms are only beginning to be understood. Here, we review recent advances in our understanding of these mechanisms, many of which take advantage of multi-step decision tasks for humans and animals.