The environmental basis of memory.

Memory should make more available things that are more likely to be needed. Across multiple environmental domains, it has been shown that such a system would match qualitatively the memory effects involving repetition, delay, and spacing (Schooler & Anderson, 2017). To obtain data of sufficient size to study how detailed patterns of past appearance predict probability of being needed again, we examined the patterns with which words appear in large two data sets: tweets from popular sources and comments on popular subreddits.

Improving judgment accuracy by sequential adjustment.

Judging an object's value based on relevant cues can be challenging. We propose a simple method to improve judgment accuracy: Instead of estimating a value after seeing all available cues simultaneously, individuals view cues sequentially, one after another, making and adjusting their estimate at each step. The sequential procedure may alleviate computational difficulties in cue integration, leading to higher judgment accuracy.

How does aging impact decision making? The contribution of cognitive decline and strategic compensation revealed in a cognitive architecture.

Older adults often face decline in cognitive resources. How does this impact their decision making-especially under high cognitive demands from concurrent activities? Do older adults' decision processes uniformly decline with increasing mental strain relative to younger adults, or do they compensate for decline by strategically reallocating resources? Using empirical data and computational modeling, we investigated older and younger adults' execution of two decision strategies in a multiattribute judgment task, while varying the demands from a concurrent task. One strategy (take-the-best) involves searching attributes in order of importance until one attribute favors one alternative; the other strategy (tallying) requires the integration of attributes favoring each alternative.

Social contact patterns can buffer costs of forgetting in the evolution of cooperation.

Analyses of the evolution of cooperation often rely on two simplifying assumptions: (i) individuals interact equally frequently with all social network members and (ii) they accurately remember each partner's past cooperation or defection. Here, we examine how more realistic, skewed patterns of contact-in which individuals interact primarily with only a subset of their network's members-influence cooperation. In addition, we test whether skewed contact patterns can counteract the decrease in cooperation caused by memory errors (i.

Cognitive costs of decision-making strategies: A resource demand decomposition analysis with a cognitive architecture.

Several theories of cognition distinguish between strategies that differ in the mental effort that their use requires. But how can the effort-or cognitive costs-associated with a strategy be conceptualized and measured? We propose an approach that decomposes the effort a strategy requires into the time costs associated with the demands for using specific cognitive resources. We refer to this approach as resource demand decomposition analysis (RDDA) and instantiate it in the cognitive architecture Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R).

Reflections of the social environment in chimpanzee memory: applying rational analysis beyond humans.

In cognitive science, the rational analysis framework allows modelling of how physical and social environments impose information-processing demands onto cognitive systems. In humans, for example, past social contact among individuals predicts their future contact with linear and power functions. These features of the human environment constrain the optimal way to remember information and probably shape how memory records are retained and retrieved.

Strategies for memory-based decision making: Modeling behavioral and neural signatures within a cognitive architecture.

How do people use memories to make inferences about real-world objects? We tested three strategies based on predicted patterns of response times and blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) responses: one strategy that relies solely on recognition memory, a second that retrieves additional knowledge, and a third, lexicographic (i.e., sequential) strategy, that considers knowledge conditionally on the evidence obtained from recognition memory.

From perception to preference and on to inference: an approach-avoidance analysis of thresholds.

In a lexicographic semiorders model for preference, cues are searched in a subjective order, and an alternative is preferred if its value on a cue exceeds those of other alternatives by a threshold Δ, akin to a just noticeable difference in perception. We generalized this model from preference to inference and refer to it as Δ-inference. Unlike with preference, where accuracy is difficult to define, the problem a mind faces when making an inference is to select a Δ that can lead to accurate judgments.

We'll meet again: revealing distributional and temporal patterns of social contact.

What are the dynamics and regularities underlying social contact, and how can contact with the people in one's social network be predicted? In order to characterize distributional and temporal patterns underlying contact probability, we asked 40 participants to keep a diary of their social contacts for 100 consecutive days. Using a memory framework previously used to study environmental regularities, we predicted that the probability of future contact would follow in systematic ways from the frequency, recency, and spacing of previous contact. The distribution of contact probability across the members of a person's social network was highly skewed, following an exponential function.

Are stripes beneficial? Dazzle camouflage influences perceived speed and hit rates.

In the animal kingdom, camouflage refers to patterns that help potential prey avoid detection. Mostly camouflage is thought of as helping prey blend in with their background. In contrast, disruptive or dazzle patterns protect moving targets and have been suggested as an evolutionary force in shaping the dorsal patterns of animals.

Mapping the structure of semantic memory.

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual's semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals have a small-world structure with short distances between words and high clustering.

The recognition heuristic: a review of theory and tests.

The recognition heuristic is a prime example of how, by exploiting a match between mind and environment, a simple mental strategy can lead to efficient decision making. The proposal of the heuristic initiated a debate about the processes underlying the use of recognition in decision making. We review research addressing four key aspects of the recognition heuristic: (a) that recognition is often an ecologically valid cue; (b) that people often follow recognition when making inferences; (c) that recognition supersedes further cue knowledge; (d) that its use can produce the less-is-more effect - the phenomenon that lesser states of recognition knowledge can lead to more accurate inferences than more complete states.

Cognitive niches: an ecological model of strategy selection.

How do people select among different strategies to accomplish a given task? Across disciplines, the strategy selection problem represents a major challenge. We propose a quantitative model that predicts how selection emerges through the interplay among strategies, cognitive capacities, and the environment. This interplay carves out for each strategy a cognitive niche, that is, a limited number of situations in which the strategy can be applied, simplifying strategy selection.

A signal-detection analysis of fast-and-frugal trees.

Models of decision making are distinguished by those that aim for an optimal solution in a world that is precisely specified by a set of assumptions (a so-called "small world") and those that aim for a simple but satisfactory solution in an uncertain world where the assumptions of optimization models may not be met (a so-called "large world"). Few connections have been drawn between these 2 families of models. In this study, the authors show how psychological concepts originating in the classic signal-detection theory (SDT), a small-world approach to decision making, can be used to understand the workings of a class of simple models known as fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs).

The robust beauty of ordinary information.

Heuristics embodying limited information search and noncompensatory processing of information can yield robust performance relative to computationally more complex models. One criticism raised against heuristics is the argument that complexity is hidden in the calculation of the cue order used to make predictions. We discuss ways to order cues that do not entail individual learning.

It just felt right: the neural correlates of the fluency heuristic.

Simple heuristics exploit basic human abilities, such as recognition memory, to make decisions based on sparse information. Based on the relative speed of recognizing two objects, the fluency heuristic infers that the one recognized more quickly has the higher value with respect to the criterion of interest. Behavioral data show that reliance on retrieval fluency enables quick inferences.

From recognition to decisions: extending and testing recognition-based models for multialternative inference.

The recognition heuristic is a noncompensatory strategy for inferring which of two alternatives, one recognized and the other not, scores higher on a criterion. According to it, such inferences are based solely on recognition. We generalize this heuristic to tasks with multiple alternatives, proposing a model of how people identify the consideration sets from which they make their final decisions.

Ways of probing situated concepts.

Two ways of eliciting conceptual content have been to instruct participants to list the intrinsic properties that concept exemplars possess or to report any thoughts that come to mind about the concept. It has been argued that the open, unconstrained probe is better able to elicit the situational information that concepts contain. We evaluated this proposal in two experiments comparing the two probes with regard to the content that they yield for object concepts at the superordinate and basic levels.

Forgetting constrains the emergence of cooperative decision strategies.

Theoretical studies of cooperative behavior have focused on decision strategies that depend on a partner's last choices. The findings from this work assume that players accurately remember past actions. The kind of memory that these strategies employ, however, does not reflect what we know about memory.

Cognitive aging and the adaptive use of recognition in decision making.

The recognition heuristic, which predicts that a recognized object scores higher on some criterion than an unrecognized one, is a simple inference strategy and thus an attractive mental tool for making inferences with limited cognitive resources--for instance, in old age. In spite of its simplicity, the recognition heuristic might be negatively affected in old age by too much knowledge, inaccurate memory, or deficits in its adaptive use. Across 2 studies, we investigated the impact of cognitive aging on the applicability, accuracy, and adaptive use of the recognition heuristic.

The smart potential behind probability matching.

Probability matching is a classic choice anomaly that has been studied extensively. While many approaches assume that it is a cognitive shortcut driven by cognitive limitations, recent literature suggests that it is not a strategy per se, but rather another outcome of people's well-documented misperception of randomness. People search for patterns even in random sequences, which results in probability matching at the outcome level.

Fluency heuristic: a model of how the mind exploits a by-product of information retrieval.

Boundedly rational heuristics for inference can be surprisingly accurate and frugal for several reasons. They can exploit environmental structures, co-opt complex capacities, and elude effortful search by exploiting information that automatically arrives on the mental stage. The fluency heuristic is a prime example of a heuristic that makes the most of an automatic by-product of retrieval from memory, namely, retrieval fluency.

The aging decision maker: cognitive aging and the adaptive selection of decision strategies.

Are older adults' decision abilities fundamentally compromised by age-related cognitive decline? Or can they adaptively select decision strategies? One study (N = 163) investigated the impact of cognitive aging on the ability to select decision strategies as a function of environment structure. Participants made decisions in either an environment that favored the use of information-intensive strategies or one favoring the use of simple, information-frugal strategies. Older adults tended to (a) look up less information and take longer to process it and (b) use simpler, less cognitively demanding strategies.

Why you think milan is larger than modena: neural correlates of the recognition heuristic.

When ranking two alternatives by some criteria and only one of the alternatives is recognized, participants overwhelmingly adopt the strategy, termed the recognition heuristic (RH), of choosing the recognized alternative. Understanding the neural correlates underlying decisions that follow the RH could help determine whether people make judgments about the RH's applicability or simply choose the recognized alternative. We measured brain activity by using functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants indicated which of two cities they thought was larger (Experiment 1) or which city they recognized (Experiment 2).

Simple predictions fueled by capacity limitations: when are they successful?

Counterintuitively, Y. Kareev, I. Lieberman, and M.