Category: psychology

Readers of Chinese use different parts of the brain from readers of English, write Brian Butterworth and Joey Tang

This guardian article is interesting in it’s own right – different phonological and visuo-spatial requirements of reading english vs reading chinese, ‘Chinese dyslexia may be caused by a different genetic anomaly than English dyslexia’, etc – and also because it is an example of two scientists turning their research into popular news form themselves – bravo them and bravo the guardian for letting them do it.

A bit of a killer for notions of personal agency and/or sacred nature of love:

How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Js: Implicit Egotism and Interpersonal Attraction

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004, Vol. 87, No. 5, 665-683

John T. Jones, Brett W. Pelham, Mauricio Carvallo, Matthew C. Mirenberg

Abstract
From the perspective of implicit egotism people should gravitate toward others who resemble them because similar others activate people’s positive, automatic associations about themselves. Four archival studies and 3 experiments supported this hypothesis. Studies 1?4 showed that people are disproportionately likely to marry others whose first or last names resemble their own. Studies 5?7 provided experimental support for implicit egotism. Participants were more attracted than usual to people (a) whose arbitrary experimental code numbers resembled their own birthday numbers, (b) whose surnames shared letters with their own surnames, and (c) whose jersey number had been paired, subliminally, with their own names. Discussion focuses on implications for implicit egotism, similarity, and interpersonal attraction.

Mind Hacks will be in the shops soon. Meanwhile you can read some samples from the book on the O’Reilly pages here

An interview I did with V S Ramachadran has just appeared in the November issue of The Psychologist magazine (free online access in six months time, if you want the PDF now email me).

Not all of our conversation made it into the published article, so here is an extra bit of text that has nowhere else to be. Prof. Ramachandran had been speaking at the Winchester Festival of Art and the Mind about the psychological laws which underlie the construction and appreciation of visual art:

TS : You say your “universal laws” may pertain to less than 10% of art…the remaining 90% of variance being driven by culture. But couldnt an art historian argue that it is precisely this 90% thats interesting about art? Isn’t the universal 10% just about perception rather than art?

VSR : Well it depends on what you mean by “interesting”… the question is interesting for whom? Art historians are interested in the 90% .. its what they do for a living. Scientists, on the other hand, are interested in precisely the 10% that cuts across cultural boundaries.

Secondly I prefer to use the phrase “Aesthetic universals” or “laws” rather than “laws of ART”. Art is a loaded word that has now come to mean anything and everything that anyone wants to call “art” – such as Damien Hirst’s pickled cows- and thats not a good place for a scientist to start. If you dilute the meaning of the word art to encompass any entity – then there isn’t much to study.

Third your suggestion that the 10% I’m calling “universal laws” applies only to the earlier less interesting perceptual component of art rather than aesthetic response is based on the now out-moded strictly modular hierarchic bucket-brigade view of perception put forward by David Marr, Fodor and other AI researchers who knew very little about the brain. The boundary between where perception ends and where visual aesthetics begins isnt all that clear cut.. in fact there are probably innumerable feedback messages from high level object parsing, limbic emotional circuits, and so called perceptual principles of object segmentation … these feedback signals are what generate the multiple “aha” signals for each partial glimpse of object-like chunk; “Ahas” that the artist exploits. As I said its “visual foreplay before the climax of recognition and arousal”.

Catching up with my journal abstracts, I noticed this:

Rotteveel, M.; Phaf, R.H. (2004). Loading working memory enhances affective priming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11. 11, 2, 326-331(6).
Abstract: Stronger affective priming (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) with suboptimal (i.e., reduced consciousness) than with optimal (i.e., full consciousness) prime presentation suggests that nonconscious processes form an important part of emotions. Merikle and Joordens (1997) have argued that both impoverished presentation and divided attention can produce suboptimal conditions and result in parallel effects. We manipulated attention by means of a concurrent working memory load while keeping presentation duration constant, as participants evaluated Japanese ideographs that were preceded by happy,neutral, or angry faces (affective priming) and male or female faces (nonaffective priming). In contrast to nonaffective priming, affective priming was larger with divided attention than with focused attention. It is concluded that manipulations of stimulus quality and of attention can both be used to probe the distinction between conscious and nonconscious processes and that the highest chances of obtaining the pattern of stronger priming with suboptimal presentation than with optimal presentation occur in the affective domain.

Which I can’t help thinking implies: if you want to pull people’s emotional strings (without them knowing it) then you should keep them busy.

Call me a social-control conspiracist, but i think this is another good reason for us all to spend more time sitting down with a cup of tea and less time working to keep the economy going

Quoting Slovic et al (1982), Facts versus fears: Understanding perceived risk:

…Sowby (1965) provided extensive data on risks per hour of exposure, showing, for example, than an hour of riding a motorcycle is as risky as an hour of being 75 years old.

Refs:

A neat little effect:

Moore says,

If two successive sounds are heard as fused, the location of the total sound is determined largely by the location of the first sound. This is known as the “precedence effect”, although it has been called the “Haas effect”…

This, among other things, stops you getting confused when a sound comes at you from two speakers at once.

Now, if you drop something and record the sound, and then play it back backwards, you can hear the echos that are normally masked.

(Thanks to Nicol, and his supervisor, for the info)

There is more, of course, in the book

Ref:
B.C.J. Moore, An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, 5th Ed., Academic Press, San Diego (2003).

What has psychology done? A challenge to silence the doubters comes from the BPS in this Month’s issue of The Psychologist

The Society’s Publications and Communications Board would like to produce a new document to complement the Annual Report, focusing on psychology rather than the Society. This report would outline significant scientific research developments and practical applications from the discipline in the last year.The aim is to promote the usefulness of the discipline to an external audience of research councils, politicians, civil servants, employers and journalists. Before potentially producing this as a separate document in 2006 we would like to pilot the project as a special feature in The Psychologist. Your contributions are sought. We are looking for brief descriptions of:

published research from the last year

partnerships between academia and the public or commercial sector leading to new products or applications of psychological knowledge; or

new professional developments which will have a significant impact on the lives of others.
…you could even just send one sentence on what has been found, one on why it is important in terms of understanding people or making a difference to their lives, plus the reference. Material has to be intrinsically relevant and interesting to an extremely wide audience with little or no background knowledge of the area, and written in a way that makes it more so. It is a tough task, but this is a great opportunity to show what psychology has been up…This is your chance to silence the psychology doubters by showcasing interesting and useful research from the last year, so get writing. Send your contribution to jonsut@bps.org.uk by Monday 15 November. Feel free to get in touch before then if you have any questions about the process or the suitability of material. [my emphasis]

Real laziness here, stealing notes from a review of a book that I can’t be bothered to read
The Book: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few by James Surowiecki
The Review: London Review of Books. The Notes: gyford.com

Phenomenon: For many decisions the average of many judgements is often better than the judgement of a single, albeit expert, individual. Example: judging the number of jellybeans in a jar – typically even individuals who have previously been most accurate (‘the experts’) will be outperformed by the average answers.

Seems analogous to the ‘less is more’ effect. This is, roughly, that sometimes an overabundance of information can distract you from applying an on-average-correct heuristic. Example: Answer this question Which city has more inhabitants: San Diego or San Antonio?. Who should do better at this question, Germans or Americans? The Germans, typically, have little knowledge of the size of American cities. So when given this pair they guess that the one they have heard of is larger (San Diego), and they are correct. The Americans know lots about American cities. They try to use all the information they have to make a correct decision. Which is more politically important? Which has more people I know living in it? Which felt bigger when I visited? Sometimes this information is helpful, sometimes it is distracting. Sometimes decision making based on more knowledge is outperformed by that based on less knowledge (here the analogy with the wisdom of crowds i guess). In one study [1] the German group using their simple recognition heuristic scored 100%. More generally, often neither method/group is always correct, but the simple, one criterion, rule can often be more correct.

So one mechanism by which the wisdom-of-crowds effect works is probably just reducing the level of knowledge that is contributing to the decision. A dumb kind of wisdom!

But crowds can often be dumb-dumb too, especially when they become herds. What are the conditions under which they keep their dumb-wisdom, the conditions when a mixture is better than the best expert?

Quoting gyford.com

Requires certain conditions for the crowd to make good decisions: members of group must be willing to think for themselves; they must be mostly independent of each other; must be reasonably decentralised; must be some means of aggregating opinions into a collective judgement. If people start second-guessing each other, or following each other, the crowd becomes a herd and herds are bad at decision making…Crowds do not do well the question is not a straight-forwardly cognitive one. They are not good at moral judgments.

You might argue that a group of people which are all thinking for themselves isn’t really a crowd. You might also argue that the wisdom of crowds doesn’t apply to moral judgements because individual judgements are non-commensurable in so many ways, not just because they are subject to lots of weird biases. If the choice is the same, but the individuals are making different decisions (e.g. they have access to contradictory information and/or they are using different criteria to select what a ‘good’ answer is) then aggregation isn’t possible.

I think a more helpful book would not be The Wisdom of Crowds – Why the Many are Smarter than the Few but The Wisdom of Crowds – How the Many can be Smarter than the Few. Anyway, good to have some starting notes on when crowd decisions will outperform individual decisions – and when ’emergent’ decisions will be herd-like and unproductive.

Refs

[1] Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: The recognition
heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90. Online here

A wrinkle to add to one of my favourite neurobiology factoids: Dolphins may not sleep with one side of their brains at a time after all [1]. Or, rather, they do sleep one side at a time (unihemispherically), but they may also sometimes let both sides sleep at once, albeit very briefly.

It’s not just dolphins who sleep with one side of the brains at a time. Other sea-sleeping mammals (whales, seals and manatee), many birds and maybe reptiles, like crocodiles, sleep unihemispherically too [1].

Posture assumed by northern fur seals during unihemispheric slow-wave sleep in water. In this example, the fur seal is lying on its left side while the left flipper (connected to the awake (right) hemisphere) constantly paddles. This posture allows the fur seal to keep its nostrils above the water?s surface, while the left hemisphere sleeps. When the fur seal switches to lying on its right side, the left hemisphere remains awake while the right hemisphere sleeps. (Figure and text shamelessly stolen without permission)

So: possibly our reptilian ancestors slept unihemispherically and we lost the habit as we tripped up the phylogenetic scale. Secondly, dolphins probably wouldn’t sleep one hemisphere at a time if they weren’t sleeping in the water. If we could just convince those guys to move onto land…I mean they’re pretty smart already, think what they could do if they could let one of their hemispheres drop the functions needed for wakefulness [3]. With one hemisphere relived of the need to be self-sufficient it could develop a deeper, complementary role for the other, waking-responsible hemisphere. They could be even smarter than they already are. Lets face it, we could do with some help up here- we need the dolphins on our team!

Hmm. Anyway. I wonder if there asymmetries in the human hemispheric response to sleep? It would suggest that a similar process had happen in mammalian evolution. And did dolphins evolve from a land-based mammalian line, and when?

Refs

1. Sam H. Ridgway (2002). Asymmetry and Symmetry in Brain Waves from Dolphin Left and Right Hemispheres: Some Observations after Anesthesia, during Quiescent Hanging Behavior, and during Visual Obstruction. Brain, Behavior and Evolution 2002;60:265-274

3. Incidentally dolphins do have some hemispheric specialisation – they have a left dominance for visuo-spatial cognition (ie the opposite to humans): Kilian, A., von Fersen, L., G?nt?rk?n, O. (2000). Lateralization of visuospatial processing in the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Behav Brain Res 116: 211-215

My friend Nicol had his first paper in Nature come out today [1]. Well done Nicol! [2]. For any readers who care for a bit of computational neuroscience, with information theory on the side, here’s the abstract:

A sound, depending on the position of its source, can take more time to reach one ear than the other. This interaural (between the ears) time difference (ITD) provides a major cue for determining the source location. Many auditory neurons are sensitive to ITDs, but the means by which such neurons represent ITD is a contentious issue. Recent studies question whether the classical general model (the Jeffress model) applies across species. Here we show that ITD coding strategies of different species can be explained by a unifying principle: that the ITDs an animal naturally encounters should be coded with maximal accuracy. Using statistical techniques and a stochastic neural model, we demonstrate that the optimal coding strategy for ITD depends critically on head size and sound frequency. For small head sizes and/or low-frequency sounds, the optimal coding strategy tends towards two distinct sub-populations tuned to ITDs outside the range created by the head. This is consistent with recent observations in small mammals. For large head sizes and/or high frequencies, the optimal strategy is a homogeneous distribution of ITD tunings within the range created by the head. This is consistent with observations in the barn owl. For humans, the optimal strategy to code ITDs from an acoustically measured distribution depends on frequency; above 400 Hz a homogeneous distribution is optimal, and below 400 Hz distinct sub-populations are optimal.

Update: Article from BBC news Hearing more complex than thought

Refs
[1] Optimal neural population coding of an auditory spatial cue
Nicol S. Harper and David McAlpine
Nature, 05 August 2004, Volume 430, No. 7000, pgs 682-686

[2] I am immensely proud – in the it-had-nothing-whatsoever-to-do-with-me-I-just-watched-it-happen kinda way

I think coming across stuff like this is one of the reasons I love science. I’d never have thought of it, but someone did and now the knowledge is available for everyone to share. Plus it means that somewhere in Germany, someone is getting paid to centifuge fish.

Risk-taking behavior in adolescent mice: psychobiological determinants and early epigenetic influence
Giovanni Laviola, Simone Macri, Sara Morley-Fletcher, Walter Adriani
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 27 (2003) 19?31

Abstract: Epidemiological research has emphasized that adolescence is associated with some temperamental and behavioral traits that are typical of this age and that might substantially contribute to both psychological and psychobiological vulnerability. The contribution of the important developmental rearrangements in neurobiological and neuroendocrinological processes has received surprisingly little investigation. The present review summarizes recent work in animal models, indicating that adolescent rodents exhibit marked peculiarities in their spontaneous behavioral repertoire. When compared to adults, adolescents show an unbalanced and extremes oriented behavior, consisting of an increased novelty seeking, together with decreased novelty-induced stress and anxiety, an increased risk-taking behavior in the plus-maze, as well as elevated levels of impulsivity and restlessness. Age-related discontinuities in the function of monoaminergic systems, which are a main target of abused drugs, can perhaps account for such a profile. In particular, a peculiar function within reward-related dopaminergic brain pathways actually seems to underlie the search for novel and rewarding sensations, as well as changes in the magnitude of psychostimulant effects. The role played by early epigenetic factors in the shaping of novelty-seeking behavior of adolescent and adult rodents are also reviewed. Two examples are considered, namely, subtle variations in the hormonal milieu as a function of intrauterine position and precocious or delayed maturation of nutritional independence as a function of changes in time of weaning. As for spontaneous drug consumption, a prominent vulnerability to the oral intake of nicotine during early adolescence is reported. In conclusion, adolescence in rodents may represent a suitable animal model with enough face- and construct-validity. Actually, this model is able to show behavioral features that resemble those found in human adolescents, including vulnerability to the consumption of psychoactive drugs.

Neurobiology of fish under altered gravity conditions
Ralf H. Anken, Michael Ibsch, Hinrich Rahmann
Brain Research Reviews 28 1998 9?18

Abstract: In vertebrates (including man), an altered gravitational environment such as weightlessness can induce malfunction of the inner ear, based on an irregular dislocation of the otoliths from the corresponding sensory epithelia. This dislocation leads to an illusionary tilt, since the otolithic inputs are not in register with other sensory organs. This results in an intersensory conflict. Vertebrates in orbit therefore face severe orientation problems. In humans, the intersensory conflict may additionally lead to a malaise, commonly referred to as space motion sickness (SMS). During the first days in weightlessness, the orientation problems and SMS disappear, since the brain develops a new compensatory interpretation of the available sensory data. The present review reports the neurobiological responses?particularly in fish?observed at altered gravitational states, concerning behaviour and neuroplastic reactivities. Recent investigations employing microgravity (spaceflight, parabolic aircraft flights, clinostat) and hyper-gravity (laboratory centrifuges as ground based research tools) yielded clues and insights into the understanding of the respective basic phenomena. The possible sources of human space sickness a kinetosis and of the space adaptation syndrome (when a sensory reinterpretation of gravitational and visual cues takes place) are particularly highlighted with regard to the functional significance of bilaterally asymmetric otoliths (weight, size).

I can’t recommend highly enough Descarte’s Baby by Paul Bloom. I never found developmental psychology particularly interesting until recently. Bloom’s book is a great example of why I should have paid more attention to the field. He combines an evolutionary framework and a solidly cognitive approach to address (read ‘speculate on’) the things that are at the very heart of humanness.

One point he makes which doesn’t make it into my review for The Psychologist– which is embarrassingly gushing anyway – is the idea that our innate disposition towards dualism helps explain the popular appeal of neuroimaging research. The amazement that greets an fMRI experiment showing the involvement of the frontal lobe in thinking about whether to ask for a rise, or the involvement of your parietal lobe in thinking about how to assemble Ikea furniture [2] can be reduced to / explained as a simple amazement that anything to do with mind has a correspondence in the brain. Of course, to a cognitive neuroscientist that’s axiomatic. But to the layperson maybe their unquestioned dualism means they are still impressed that cognitive activity produces biological effects.

Persistent dualism might also be part of the reason that the ‘We only use 10% of our brains’ myth is so common. To a neuroscientist it’s a (sorry) no-brainer – Did you think that 90% of that 1.2 kg of your body was just sitting there, with no purpose?!– but many people still think of themselves as eternal souls, not as biological machines. From this point of view it seem entirely plausible that what we perceive as us could be pretty much independent of our brains.

Refs

[1] Descarte’s Baby – How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human by Paul Bloom
Publisher: William Heinemann. Date, Price & Format: July 1st, 2004, ?20 Hardback

[2] I just made these examples up, sorry. But you get the idea.

Bless the heart of the British Psychological Society. I’ve just discovered that their email system has a profanity filter which protects their staff from receiving mail containing any vulgar words.

I found this out after emailing the editor of The Psychologist magazine about a research summary we may publish in the magazine. I’ve put the citation which tripped the profanity filter at the end of this post so, gentle reader, please be warned and avert your eyes if you are of a sensitive disposition:

Dong, C., Sanchez, L.E. & Price, R.A. (2004). Relationship of obesity to depression: A family-based study. International Journal of Obesity, 28, 790-795.

update: Jon, the editor, informs me that the offending word falls on their list in between ‘dildo’ and ‘dothead’. Thank goodness the BPS protects employees from this kind of filth…

update 2It has just occured to me that it is a little strange that BPS employees cannot receive emails with profanities in, but they can evidently send them

I remain skeptical as Philip Zimbardo [1] promises that Psychologists are positioned to “give psychology away” to all those who can benefit from our wisdom. I don’t think we’ve had such a good track record over the years – psychosurgery, electroshock re-education, ECT, psychiatric medication, Freudianism – what makes us so sure that now psychological science is ready to go out and tell people how to run their lives (again).

And even though there are undoubtably true and useful bits of psychological research I think the market could benefit from more skepticism about the truth and usefulness of psychology, not more hard-sell about the wonder-benefits of ‘scientific’ approaches to the mind.

But hey i guess i should shut up until i can get hold of a copy of the full article to read.

[1] Does Psychology make a significant difference in our lives?
By Zimbardo, Philip G. American Psychologist. 59(5), Jul-Aug 2004, 339-351.

Recommended items to pack a fresh brain:

1. Put the fresh brain (A)

2. In a ziploc bag (B)

3. Wait! Don’t just ziploc – double-ziploc (C)

Pack with ice and post!

Continue reading the shipping information for fresh brains at the New York Brain Bank website (also availale in PDF)

The order in which different brain areas reach maturity must be crucial to how activity-guided development creates functional specialisation (there’s good stuff on this in Rethinking Innateness). Here’s a maturational timetable (via) for different brain areas:

Notice that it’s areas associated with audition that finish myelination first (in the womb), and the neocortex which finishes last (about 25 years later).

Ref:

Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

Like a dutiful embodied cognitivist i believe that what we’re doing affects how we think. Or, on a more mircoscale, that the task we’re engaged in affects the how we process the stimuli we’re sensing. Not just how we process the stimuli in the sense of the parameters of the processes used to deal with it, but that the actual processes themselves alter – and not always in ways we have personal insight into.

So, as part of my duties i was re-reading Goodale & Milner’s (1992) classic paper “Separate visual pathways for perception and action”. They discuss research that shows that motor systems aren’t fooled by various illusions – so that with things like the muller-lyer illusion, our fingers reaching to grab the object are not fooled in the same way as our eyes are fooled in providing us with information on size. They go on to say:

The functional modules supporting perceptual experience of the world may have evolved more recently than those controlling actions within it

But that’s just an aside. The question that jumps out at me is, if the type of response affects stimulus processing, what kind of response is conscious experience?

Ref

1. Goodale MA, Milner AD (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action. Trends in Neurosciences, 15(1), 20-25.

Like i said, the rat is more spinal cord than cortex, whereas the human is more cortical than spinal cord by a factor of nearly forty. Does anything else happen as we stagger up up the phylogenetic ladder? Well there’s a whole lot of crinkles added…

Rat:

Man:

The unexpected consequences of a noisy environment
Xiaoqin Wang
Trends in Neurosciences
Volume 27, Issue 7 , July 2004, Pages 364-366
Laboratory of Auditory Neurophysiology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Abstract: A recent study found that the functional organization of auditory cortex was disrupted when rats were exposed to a moderate level of continuous noise during early development. However, this detrimental effect on auditory cortex could be remedied later by stimulating the noise-reared rats with structured sounds. These findings suggest that the endpoint of the ?critical period? could be extended well into adult life, which has significant implications for our understanding of cortical plasticity.

Backlink

Thanks to Brain facts and figures

Nature discuss neuromarketing:

A more skeptic view of neuromarketing is that cognitive scientists, many of whom watched from the sidelines as their molecular colleagues got rich, are now jumping on the commercial bandwagon. According to this view, neuromarketing is little more than a new fad, exploited by scientists and marketing consultants to blind corporate clients with science

No one would do that, would they? Would they…?

Geoffrey Sampson doesn’t believe in the language instinct. I remember reading his book Educating Eve in my final year at university and being splendidly, incoherantly, annoyed by his views on the nature-nurture debate. My girlfriend at the time had been set the book as part of her linguistics course and I singularly failed to express to her just how wrong-headed Sampson’s arguments were – how he completely failed to engage with the whole point of Pinker’s book., for one thing.

Of course I was fresh from reading things like Rethinking Innateness and had all the zeal of the new convert. I can’t remember the details of Sampson’s argument, and now I think i’d like to re-read it to check if i still feel the same way, and maybe to recapture that feeling of annoyance. Maybe my appreciation of it will have changed, I certainly think my appreciation of the language innateness debate has changed – i’ve had the luck to read Terance Deacon’s The Symbolic Species for a start, and that’s a book which should stretch anyone’s appreciation of language and brain evolution.

This is a screenshot of me playing with the BrainVoyager BrainTutor. BrainVoyager make fMRI analysis and visualisation software, and they’re kind enough to offer this interactive guide to different cortical regions for free.

Pictures can’t describe how much fun it is to play with, adding and removing the different hemispheres, labels, views, rotating the whole head, etc. It’s a shame they don’t have more areas programmed in at the moment (it’s just the lobes the gyri and sulci – but there’s a promising ‘forthcoming’ button for Brodmann areas).

Precis of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Oxford University Press, 1999

Abstract: How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart, we explore fast and frugal heuristics–simple rules in the mind’s adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments. In this precis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search. These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data–that is, simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program.

Haven’t read this for a while, and on re-reading this jumped out

5.1 Exploiting environment structure
Fast and frugal heuristics can benefit from the way information is structured in environments. The QuickEst heuristic described earlier, for instance (see chapter 10), relies on the skewed distributions of many real-world variables such as city population size–an aspect of environment structure that traditional statistical estimation techniques would either ignore or even try to erase by normalizing the data. Standard statistical models, and standard theories of rationality, aim to be as general as possible, so they make as broad and as few assumptions as possible about the data to which they will be applied. But the way information is structured in real-world environments often does not follow convenient simplifying assumptions. For instance, whereas most statistical models are designed to operate on datasets where means and variances are independent, Karl Pearson (1897) noted that in natural situations these two measures tend to be correlated, and thus each can be used as a cue to infer the other (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1981, p. 66). While general statistical methods strive to ignore such factors that could limit their applicability, evolution would seize upon informative environmental dependencies like this one and exploit them with specific heuristics if they would give a decision-making organism an adaptive edge.

Because ecological rationality is a consequence of the match between heuristic and environment, we have investigated several instances where structures of environments can make heuristics ecologically rational:

Noncompensatory information. The Take The Best heuristic equals or outperforms any linear decision strategy when information is noncompensatory, that is, when the potential contribution of each new cue falls off rapidly (chapter 6).

Scarce information. Take The Best outperforms a class of linear models on average when few cues are known relative to the number of objects (chapter 6).

J-shaped distributions. The QuickEst heuristic estimates quantities about as accurately as more complex information-demanding strategies when the criterion to be estimated follows a J-shaped distribution, that is, one with many small values and few high values (chapter 10).

Decreasing populations. In situations where the set of alternatives to choose from is constantly shrinking, such as in a seasonal mating pool, a satisficing heuristic that commits to an aspiration level quickly will outperform rules that sample many alternatives before setting an aspiration (chapter 13).
By matching these structures of information in the environment with the structure implicit in their building blocks, heuristics can be accurate without being too complex. In addition, by being simple, these heuristics can avoid being too closely matched to any particular environment–that is, they can escape the curse of overfitting, which often strikes more complex, parameter-laden models, as described next. This marriage of structure with simplicity produces the counterintuitive situations in which there is little trade-off between being fast and frugal and being accurate.