Look-ahead relevant information : Reducing cognitive burden over prolonged tasks

Based on the fact that information processing is costly, we study in this paper the trade-off between performance and informational requirements. Most importantly, we are interested in how local decisions can alleviate future cognitive burden, measured by the amount of sensory information an agent processes, without conceding performance. We introduce lookahead information as a novel concept to capture the long-term informational requirements and present an iterative method to determine the value of this quantity. Using an example problem, we show how these long-term considerations enable an agent to predict future effects of its actions on its informational burden, and to shape the course of the world to achieve more informationally parsimonious behaviour.