Uncovering cognitive constraints is the bottleneck in resource-rational analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cvetomir Dimov
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Cognitive Architectures ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Constraints ◽  
Major Constraint ◽  
The Mind

Abstract A major constraint in resource-rational analysis is cognitive resources. Yet, uncovering the nature of individual components of the human mind has progressed slowly, because even the simplest behavior is a function of most (if not all) of the mind. Accelerating our understanding of the mind's structure requires more efforts in developing cognitive architectures.

Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Falk Lieder ◽  
Thomas L. Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Cognitive Modeling ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Architectures ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Constraints ◽  
Rational Models ◽  
And Linguistics

Abstract Modeling human cognition is challenging because there are infinitely many mechanisms that can generate any given observation. Some researchers address this by constraining the hypothesis space through assumptions about what the human mind can and cannot do, while others constrain it through principles of rationality and adaptation. Recent work in economics, psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics has begun to integrate both approaches by augmenting rational models with cognitive constraints, incorporating rational principles into cognitive architectures, and applying optimality principles to understanding neural representations. We identify the rational use of limited resources as a unifying principle underlying these diverse approaches, expressing it in a new cognitive modeling paradigm called resource-rational analysis. The integration of rational principles with realistic cognitive constraints makes resource-rational analysis a promising framework for reverse-engineering cognitive mechanisms and representations. It has already shed new light on the debate about human rationality and can be leveraged to revisit classic questions of cognitive psychology within a principled computational framework. We demonstrate that resource-rational models can reconcile the mind's most impressive cognitive skills with people's ostensive irrationality. Resource-rational analysis also provides a new way to connect psychological theory more deeply with artificial intelligence, economics, neuroscience, and linguistics.

scholarly journals The anchoring bias reflects rational use of cognitive resources

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Falk Lieder ◽  
Tom Griffiths ◽  
Quentin J.M. Huys ◽  
Noah D. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Process Model ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Reasoning Under Uncertainty ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
Rational Use ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Anchoring Bias

Cognitive biases, such as the anchoring bias, pose a serious challenge to rational accounts of human cognition. We investigate whether rational theories can meet this challenge by taking into account the mind’s bounded cognitive resources. We asked what reasoning under uncertainty would look like if people made rational use of their finite time and limited cognitive resources. To answer this question, we applied a mathematical theory of bounded rationality to the problem of numerical estimation. Our analysis led to a rational process model that can be interpreted in terms of anchoring-and-adjustment. This model provided a unifying explanation for ten anchoring phenomena including the differential effect of accuracy motivation on the bias towards provided versus self-generated anchors. Our results illustrate the potential of resource-rational analysis to provide formal theories that can unify a wide range of empirical results and reconcile the impressive capacities of the human mind with its apparently irrational cognitive biases.

Advancing rational analysis to the algorithmic level

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Falk Lieder ◽  
Thomas L. Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Cognitive Architectures ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Cognitive Constraints ◽  
Methodological Advance ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Human Rationality

Abstract The commentaries raised questions about normativity, human rationality, cognitive architectures, cognitive constraints, and the scope or resource rational analysis (RRA). We respond to these questions and clarify that RRA is a methodological advance that extends the scope of rational modeling to understanding cognitive processes, why they differ between people, why they change over time, and how they could be improved.

Ali Al-Wardi and his critique of the human mind*

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Al-Haidari
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Limited Capacity ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
Aristotelian Logic ◽  
Karl Mannheim ◽  
The Mind

Ali Al-Wardi was influenced by the philosophical ideas that criticized the assumption that the nature of the human mind is fixed. These ideas come from his reading of Ibn Khaldun, Sigmund Freud and Karl Mannheim. He reinterpreted their ideas of the mind and applied it to Iraqi society and the Iraqi mind. He believes that human nature is egocentric and determined in most actions, motivated by the subconscious. The role of the mind is to justify human behaviour. The mind is one-sided and biased and is untrustworthy. It is only an organ that aids humans in their quest for survival. Also the mind has a limited capacity and is surrounded by a dense rim of values, beliefs and interests. Al-Wardi has launched a relentless campaign against the Aristotelian logic and against reason and rationality. Despite his rational analysis, he could not free himself from the mindset he identified as a farce and did not distinguish between the productive and the instrumental mind.

Aristotle's Formal Identity of Intellect and Object: A Solution to the Problem of Modal Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Robert C. Koons
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Modal Epistemology ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Object A ◽  
Formal Identity ◽  
Identity Thesis ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Objects ◽  
Aristotelian Metaphysics

In De Anima Book III, Aristotle subscribed to a theory of formal identity between the human mind and the extra-mental objects of our understanding. This has been one of the most controversial features of Aristotelian metaphysics of the mind. I offer here a defense of the Formal Identity Thesis, based on specifically epistemological arguments about our knowledge of necessary or essential truths.

scholarly journals Application of Eye Tracking Technology in Aviation, Maritime, and Construction Industries: A Systematic Review

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4289
Author(s):  
Daniel Martinez-Marquez ◽  
Sravan Pingali ◽  
Kriengsak Panuwatwanich ◽  
Rodney A. Stewart ◽  
Sherif Mohamed
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Human Error ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Mental Performance ◽  
Medical Scientist ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Attention Failure ◽  
Demographic Distribution

Most accidents in the aviation, maritime, and construction industries are caused by human error, which can be traced back to impaired mental performance and attention failure. In 1596, Du Laurens, a French anatomist and medical scientist, said that the eyes are the windows of the mind. Eye tracking research dates back almost 150 years and it has been widely used in different fields for several purposes. Overall, eye tracking technologies provide the means to capture in real time a variety of eye movements that reflect different human cognitive, emotional, and physiological states, which can be used to gain a wider understanding of the human mind in different scenarios. This systematic literature review explored the different applications of eye tracking research in three high-risk industries, namely aviation, maritime, and construction. The results of this research uncovered the demographic distribution and applications of eye tracking research, as well as the different technologies that have been integrated to study the visual, cognitive, and attentional aspects of human mental performance. Moreover, different research gaps and potential future research directions were highlighted in relation to the usage of additional technologies to support, validate, and enhance eye tracking research to better understand human mental performance.

scholarly journals Top-down causation and emergence: some comments on mechanisms

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
George F. R. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Information Control ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Adaptive Selection ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Medical Healthcare

Both bottom-up and top-down causation occur in the hierarchy of structure and causation. A key feature is multiple realizability of higher level functions, and consequent existence of equivalence classes of lower level variables that correspond to the same higher level state. Five essentially different classes of top-down influence can be identified, and their existence demonstrated by many real-world examples. They are: algorithmic top-down causation; top-down causation via non-adaptive information control, top-down causation via adaptive selection, top-down causation via adaptive information control and intelligent top-down causation (the effect of the human mind on the physical world). Through the mind, abstract entities such as mathematical structures have causal power. The causal slack enabling top-down action to take place lies in the structuring of the system so as to attain higher level functions; in the way the nature of lower level elements is changed by context, and in micro-indeterminism combined with adaptive selection. Understanding top-down causation can have important effects on society. Two cases will be mentioned: medical/healthcare issues, and education—in particular, teaching reading and writing. In both cases, an ongoing battle between bottom-up and top-down approaches has important consequences for society.

scholarly journals Enacting Media. An Embodied Account of Enculturation Between Neuromediality and New Cognitive Media Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Fingerhut
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Generative Models ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The World ◽  
Media Work ◽  
The Mind

This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media have on our mind. To grasp this impact, I propose an enactive account of media that is based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning and new domains of values. We apply such habits, for instance, when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie. They become established through a process of reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms and define the range of viable actions within such a media ecology. Within an artifactual habit, we then become attuned to a specific media work (e.g., a TV series, a picture, a text, or even a city) that engages us. Both the plurality of habits and the dynamical adjustments within a habit require a more flexible neural architecture than is addressed by classical cognitive neuroscience. To detail how neural and media processes interlock, I will introduce the concept of neuromediality and discuss radical predictive processing accounts that could contribute to the externalization of the mind by treating media themselves as generative models of the world. After a short primer on general media theory, I discuss media examples in three domains: pictures and moving images; digital media; architecture and the built environment. This discussion demonstrates the need for a new cognitive media theory based on enactive artifactual habits—one that will help us gain perspective on the continuous re-mediation of our mind.

Remembering the Evolutionary Freud

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Young
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Psychotic Disorders ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
Evolutionary Origins ◽  
Point Of No Return ◽  
Evolutionary Narratives ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

ArgumentThroughout his career as a writer, Sigmund Freud maintained an interest in the evolutionary origins of the human mind and its neurotic and psychotic disorders. In common with many writers then and now, he believed that the evolutionary past is conserved in the mind and the brain. Today the “evolutionary Freud” is nearly forgotten. Even among Freudians, he is regarded to be a red herring, relevant only to the extent that he diverts attention from the enduring achievements of the authentic Freud. There are three ways to explain these attitudes. First, the evolutionary Freud's key work is the “Overview of the Transference Neurosis” (1915). But it was published at an inopportune moment, forty years after the author's death, during the so-called “Freud wars.” Second, Freud eventually lost interest in the “Overview” and the prospect of a comprehensive evolutionary theory of psychopathology. The publication of The Ego and the Id (1923), introducing Freud's structural theory of the psyche, marked the point of no return. Finally, Freud's evolutionary theory is simply not credible. It is based on just-so stories and a thoroughly discredited evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckian use-inheritance. Explanations one and two are probably correct but also uninteresting. Explanation number three assumes that there is a fundamental difference between Freud's evolutionary narratives (not credible) and the evolutionary accounts of psychopathology that currently circulate in psychiatry and mainstream journals (credible). The assumption is mistaken but worth investigating.

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