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

As reflected in the amount of controversy, few areas in psychology have undergone such dramatic conceptual changes in the past decade as the emerging science of heuristics. Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes, conscious or unconscious, that ignore part of the information. Because using heuristics saves effort, the classical view has been that heuristic decisions imply greater errors than do “rational” decisions as defined by logic or statistical models. However, for many decisions, the assumptions of rational models are not met, and it is an empirical rather than an a priori issue how well cognitive heuristics function in an uncertain world. To answer both the descriptive question (“Which heuristics do people use in which situations?”) and the prescriptive question (“When should people rely on a given heuristic rather than a complex strategy to make better judgments?”), formal models are indispensable. We review research that tests formal models of heuristic inference, including in business organizations, health care, and legal institutions. This research indicates that (a) individuals and organizations often rely on simple heuristics in an adaptive way, and (b) ignoring part of the information can lead to more accurate judgments than weighting and adding all information, for instance for low predictability and small samples. The big future challenge is to develop a systematic theory of the building blocks of heuristics as well as the core capacities and environmental structures these exploit.

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Heuristic Decision Making

Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes that ignore information. In contrast to the widely held view that less processing reduces accuracy, the study of heuristics shows that less information, computation, and time can in fact improve accuracy. We review the major progress made so far: (a) the discovery of less-is-more effects; (b) the study of the ecological rationality of heuristics, which examines in which environments a given strategy succeeds or fails, and why; (c) an advancement from vague labels to computational models of heuristics; (d) the development of a systematic theory of heuristics that identifies their building blocks and the evolved capacities they exploit, and views the cognitive system as relying on an ‘‘adaptive toolbox;’’ and (e) the development of an empirical methodology that accounts for individual differences, conducts competitive tests, and has provided evidence for people’s adaptive use of heuristics. Homo heuristicus has a biased mind and ignores part of the available information, yet a biased mind can handle uncertainty more efficiently and robustly than an unbiased mind relying on more resource-intensive and general-purpose processing strategies.

/pdf/homo-heuristicus-why-biased-minds-make-better-inferences-115j01ajcy.pdf

Homo Heuristicus: Why Biased Minds Make Better Inferences

Recent evidence in natural and semi-natural settings has revealed a variety of left-right perceptual asymmetries among ver- tebrates These include preferential use of the left or right visual hemifield during activities such as searching for food, agonistic re- sponses, or escape from predators in animals as different as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals There are obvious disad- vantages in showing such directional asymmetries because relevant stimuli may be located to the animal's left or right at rando m; there is no a priori association between the meaning of a stimulus (eg, its being a predator or a food item) and its being located to the ani- mal's left or right Moreover, other organisms (eg, predators) could exploit the predictability of behavior that arises from population- level lateral biases It might be argued that lateralization of function enhances cognitive capacity and efficiency of the brain, thus coun- teracting the ecological disadvantages of lateral biases in behavior However, such an increase in brain efficiency could be obtained by each individual being lateralized without any need to align the direction of the asymmetry in the majority of the individuals of the pop- ulation Here we argue that the alignment of the direction of behavioral asymmetries at the population level arises as an "evolutionarily stable strategy" under "social" pressures occurring when individually asymmetrical organisms must coordinate their behavior with the behavior of other asymmetrical organisms of the same or different species

/pdf/survival-with-an-asymmetrical-brain-advantages-and-4nfldlpjsp.pdf

Survival with an asymmetrical brain: Advantages and disadvantages of cerebral lateralization

http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/16-899A/2014_spring/thevisualworld/BarBar2007.pdf

The proactive brain: using analogies and associations to generate predictions

Current theory proposes that baseball outfielders catch fly balls by selecting a running path to achieve optical acceleration cancellation of the ball. Yet people appear to lack the ability to discriminate accelerations accurately. This study supports the idea that outfielders convert the temporal problem to a spatial one by selecting a running path that maintains a linear optical trajectory (LOT) for the ball. The LOT model is a strategy of maintaining "control" over the relative direction of optical ball movement in a manner that is similar to simple predator tracking behavior.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/268/5210/569.full.pdf

How baseball outfielders determine where to run to catch fly balls

Using micro-video cameras attached to the heads of 2 dogs, we examined their optical behavior while catching Frisbees. Our findings reveal that dogs use the same viewer-based navigational heuristics previously found with baseball players (i.e., maintaining the target along a linear optical trajectory, LOT, with optical speed constancy). On trials in which the Frisbee dramatically changed direction, the dog maintained an LOT with speed constancy until it apparently could no longer do so and then simply established a new LOT and optical speed until interception. This work demonstrates the use of simple control mechanisms that utilize invariant geometric properties to accomplish interceptive tasks. It confirms a common interception strategy that extends both across species and to complex target trajectories.

How Dogs Navigate to Catch Frisbees

We tested a finding by E. S. Robinson (1933) that people have a bias to turn right upon entering a building. We hypothesized that this bias is attributable to learning derived from traffic rules that specify driving on the right side of the road and that it also could be related to handedness. We tested participants in both the United States and England in a simple "T-maze" task in order to compare their directional preference. Handedness was the best predictor of participants' directional preference. However, U.S. participants also were statistically more likely to turn right than were English participants. The preference to turn right was not found to be significantly related to eye dominance or reading direction of the primary written language of the participant, although in the case of reading direction, the sample size of right-to-left readers was too small to be conclusive. The findings support that walking direction preference is an additive function of both learned driving patterns and genetic handedness. These findings have practical implications for the design of public spaces such as schools, businesses, and urban centers.

Right-handers and Americans favor turning to the right.

Four studies illustrate a new auditory illusion associated with the Doppler effect and demonstrate a new influence of dynamic intensity change on perceived pitch. Experiment 1 confirmed the existence of a popular belief that the pitch of a moving sound source rises as the source approaches. Because there is no corresponding rise in frequency, the authors refer to the perceived pitch rise as the Doppler illusion. Experiment 2 confirmed that the effect occurs perceptually, so the belief in a "naive principle" of physics has a perceptual basis. Experiment 3 confirmed the effect does not occur under matched static conditions. Experiment 4 showed that the influence of dynamic intensity change on perceived pitch occurs outside the realm of Doppler stimuli. The findings support a dynamic dimensional interaction of pitch and loudness, with marked differences in the perception of pitch and loudness under static and dynamic conditions.

Michael K. McBeath

Papers

How baseball outfielders determine where to run to catch fly balls

How Dogs Navigate to Catch Frisbees

Right-handers and Americans favor turning to the right.

The Doppler Illusion: The Influence of Dynamic Intensity Change on Perceived Pitch

Lateral motion bias associated with reading direction.