CiteULike: stefanherzog's recognition-heuristic

The use of recognition information and additional cues in inferences from memory

Arndt Broder — 2006-03-03T13:47:16-00:00

Acta Psychologica, Vol. 121, No. 3. (March 2006), pp. 275-284.

Goldstein and Gigerenzer's (2002) [Goldstein, D. G. & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90] "Recognition Heuristic" (RH) was tested for its empirical validity in an experimental paradigm with induced recognition of objects. RH claims that upon inferring which of two objects (e.g., cities) scores higher on a criterion (e.g., city size), a recognized object will be chosen over an unrecognized one, if the recognition is a valid predictor of the criterion without considering additional object information. Trying to avoid potential shortcomings of former studies, we (a) used the city population task, (b) provided additional cue information only for recognized cities, and (c) had participants draw inferences from memory. Participants learned city names and additional information about some cities. They also learned that recognition and the additional information were valid predictors of the criterion "city size". In a subsequent decision phase, the additional information about the cities in memory strongly affected the inferences, suggesting that recognition information is clearly integrated into judgments, but by no means in a noncompensatory fashion that would dominate every other cue.

Recognition Is Used as One Cue Among Others in Judgment and Decision Making

Tobias Richter — 2006-03-03T12:44:51-00:00

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol. 32, No. 1. (January 2006), pp. 150-162.

Three experiments with paired comparisons were conducted to test the noncompensatory character of the recognition heuristic (D. G. Goldstein & G. Gigerenzer, 2002) in judgment and decision making. Recognition and knowledge about the recognized alternative were manipulated. In Experiment 1, participants were presented pairs of animal names where the task was to select the animal with the larger population. In Experiment 2, participants chose the safer 1 out of 2 airlines, and 3 knowledge cues were varied simultaneously. Recognition effects were partly compensated by task-relevant knowledge. The compensatory effects were additive. Decisions were slower when recognition and knowledge were incongruent. In Experiment 3, compensatory effects of knowledge and recognition were found for the city-size task which had originally been used to demonstrate the noncompensatory character of the recognition heuristic. These results suggest that recognition information is not used in an all-or-none fashion but is integrated with other types of knowledge in judgment and decision making.

Ignorance is Bliss: A Study on How and Why Humans Depend on Recognition Heuristics in Social Relationships, the Equity Markets and the Brand Market-place, Thereby Making Successful Decisions

Karan Khemani — 2005-09-20T13:39:06-00:00

(1 December 2005)

A concise look in three unrelated, yet complex environments reveals a strong human dependence on the recognition heuristic. Its marketability to the mind as a good decision making tool (over other complex approaches), is shown to be almost innate and ultimately successful. The three environments, social relationships, equity markets and the brand market place, all bombard the human with a myriad of data and information. Usage of the recognition heuristic is a form of filtering, an efficient means of making a successful decision within limited resources.

How Forgetting Aids Heuristic Inference

Lael Schooler — 2005-08-22T15:16:55-00:00

Psychological Review, Vol. 112, No. 3. (July 2005), pp. 610-628.

Some theorists, ranging from W. James (1890) to contemporary psychologists, have argued that forgetting is the key to proper functioning of memory. The authors elaborate on the notion of beneficial forgetting by proposing that loss of information aids inference heuristics that exploit mnemonic information. To this end, the authors bring together 2 research programs that take an ecological approach to studying cognition. Specifically, they implement fast and frugal heuristics within the ACT-R cognitive architecture. Simulations of the recognition heuristic, which relies on systematic failures of recognition to infer which of 2 objects scores higher on a criterion value, demonstrate that forgetting can boost accuracy by increasing the chances that only 1 object is recognized. Simulations of the fluency heuristic, which arrives at the same inference on the basis of the speed with which objects are recognized, indicate that forgetting aids the discrimination between the objects' recognition speeds.