Optimal Predictions in Everyday Cognition

Thomas L. Griffiths; Joshua B. Tenenbaum

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01780.x

Optimal Predictions in Everyday Cognition

Thomas L. Griffiths¹; Joshua B. Tenenbaum²

¹ Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, and · ² Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Psychological Science 2006

Human perception and memory are often explained as optimal statistical inferences that are informed by accurate prior probabilities. In contrast, cognitive judgments are usually viewed as following error-prone heuristics that are insensitive to priors. We examined the optimality of human cognition in a more realistic context than typical laboratory studies, asking people to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday phenomena such as human life spans and the box-office take of movies. Our results suggest that everyday cognitive judgments follow the same optimal statistical principles as perception and memory, and reveal a close correspondence between people's implicit probabilistic models and the statistics of the world.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01780.x
Volume: 17 (9)
Pages: 767-773
Language: en
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