Davis, Isaac (2024) Rational representations of uncertainty: a pluralistic approach to bounded rationality. [Preprint]
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Abstract
An increasingly prevalent approach to studying human cognition is to construe the mind as optimally allocating limited cognitive resources among cognitive processes. Under this bounded rationality approach (Icard 2018, Simon 1980), it is common to assume that resource-bounded cognitive agents approximate normative solutions to statistical inference problems, and that much of the bias and variability in human performance can be explained in terms of the approximation strategies we employ. In this paper, we argue that this approach restricts itself to an unnecessarily narrow scope of cognitive models, which limits its ability to explain how humans flexibly adapt their representations to novel environments. We argue that more attention should be paid to how we form our cognitive representations in the first place, and advocate for pluralistic framework which jointly optimizes over both representations and algorithms for manipulating them. We identify several fundamental trade-offs that manifest in this joint optimization, and draw on recent work to motivate a unified formal framework for this analysis. We illustrate a simplified version of this analysis with a case study in social cognition, and outline several new directions for research that this approach suggests.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Keywords: | Resource rationality Computational modeling Philosophy of Cognitive Science | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science > Computation General Issues > Computer Simulation Specific Sciences > Psychology > Judgment and Decision Making |
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| Depositing User: | Dr. Isaac Davis | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 05 Apr 2024 06:38 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 05 Apr 2024 06:38 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 23258 | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science > Computation General Issues > Computer Simulation Specific Sciences > Psychology > Judgment and Decision Making |
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| Date: | 2024 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/23258 |
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