Fast and frugal heuristics - simple rules for making decisions with realistic mental resources - are presented here. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? What heuristics are in the mind's adaptive toolbox, and what building blocks compose them? Can judgments based simply on a single reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? This book explores these questions by developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analysis. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can yield adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop-out rates, and playing the stock market.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with oth- ers and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (1) the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and (2) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The develop- mental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition.

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Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition

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An Introduction To The Event Related Potential Technique

The cultural origins of human cognition

The mentalizing (theory of mind) system of the brain is probably in operation from ca. 18 months of age, allowing implicit attribution of intentions and other mental states. Between the ages of 4 and 6 years explicit mentalizing becomes possible, and from this age children are able to explain the misleading reasons that have given rise to a false belief. Neuroimaging studies of mentalizing have so far only been carried out in adults. They reveal a system with three components consistently activated during both implicit and explicit mentalizing tasks: medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporal poles and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). The functions of these components can be elucidated, to some extent, from their role in other tasks used in neuroimaging studies. Thus, the MPFC region is probably the basis of the decoupling mechanism that distinguishes mental state representations from physical state representations; the STS region is probably the basis of the detection of agency, and the temporal poles might be involved in access to social knowledge in the form of scripts. The activation of these components in concert appears to be critical to mentalizing.

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Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing.

Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach.

There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never been seriously considered The authors argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development and that it is evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains They discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences Throughout, the authors suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and they make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development

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Not All Emotions Are Created Equal: The Negativity Bias in Social-Emotional Development

Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions

Infants' knowledge of object motion and human action.

Prior studies (Gergely et al., 1995; Woodward, 1998) have found that infants focus on the goals of an action over other details. The current studies tested whether infants would distinguish between a behavior that seemed to be goal-directed and one that seemed not to be. Infants in one condition saw an actor grasp one of two toys that sat side by side on a stage. Infants in the other condition saw the actor drop her hand onto one of the toys in a manner that looked unintentional. Once infants had been habituated to these events, they were shown test events in which either the path of motion or the object that was touched had changed. Nine-month-olds differentiated between these two actions. When they saw the actor grasp the toy, they looked longer on trials with a change in goal object than on trials with a change in path. When they saw the actor drop her hand onto the toy, they looked equally at the two test events. These findings did not result from infants being more interested in grasping as compared to inert hands. In a second study, 5-month-old infants showed patterns similar to those seen in 9-month-olds. These findings have implications for theories of the development of the concept of intention. They argue against the claim that infants are innately predisposed to interpret any motion of an animate agent as intentional.

Amanda L. Woodward

Papers

Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach.

Not All Emotions Are Created Equal: The Negativity Bias in Social-Emotional Development

Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions

Infants' knowledge of object motion and human action.

Infants' ability to distinguish between purposeful and non-purposeful behaviors