How to learn good cue orders: When social learning benefits simple heuristics (2006)

Abstract

Take The Best (TTB) is a simple one-reason decision- making strategy that searches through cues in the order of cue validities. Interestingly, this heuristic performs comparably to, or even better than, more complex information-demanding strategies such as multiple regression. The question of how a cue ordering is learned, however, has been only recently addressed by Dieckmann and authors Todd (2004). showed that learning cue Surprisingly, these orders through feedbackby updating cue validitiesleads to a slow convergence to the ecological cue validities. Various other simple learning algorithms do not provide good results either. In the present paper, we provide a solution to this problem. Specifically, in a series of computer simulations, we show that simple social rules such as imitate the successful help to overcome the limitations of individual learning reported by Dieckmann and Todd (2004). Thus, the dilemma of individual learning can be collectively solved. In line with the spirit of bounded rationality, we found that several simple social rules performed comparably to, or better than computationally demanding social rules. We relate our results to previous findings on bounded rationality in the social context.

Bibliographic entry

García-Retamero, R., Takezawa, M., & Gigerenzer, G. (2006). How to learn good cue orders: When social learning benefits simple heuristics. In R. Sun & N. Miyake (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1352-1357). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. (Full text)

Miscellaneous

Publication year 2006
Document type: In book
Publication status: Published
External URL: http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/Proceedings/2006/docs/p1352.pdf View
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