heuristics

What makes a good query? Prospects for a comprehensive theory of human information acquisition

Searching for information in a goal-directed manner is central for learning, diagnosis, and prediction. Children continuously ask questions to learn new concepts, doctors do medical tests to diagnose their patients, and scientists perform experiments …

Stepwise versus globally optimal search in children and adults

How do children and adults search for information when stepwise-optimal strategies fail to identify the most efficient query? The value of questions is often measured in terms of stepwise information gain (expected reduction of entropy on the next …

How should autonomous cars drive? A preference for defaults in moral judgments under risk and uncertainty

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise to make traffic safer, but their societal integration poses ethical challenges. What behavior of AVs is morally acceptable in critical traffic situations when consequences are only probabilistically known (a …

Generalized information theory meets human cognition: Introducing a unified framework to model uncertainty and information search

Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the patient might have. In a probabilistic framework, test selection is …

Towards a theory of heuristic and optimal planning for sequential information search

How should tests (or queries, questions, or experiments) be selected? Does it matter if only a single test is allowed, or if a sequential test strategy can be planned in advance? This article contributes two sets of theoretical results bearing on …

Asking better questions: How presentation formats influence information search

While the influence of presentation formats have been widely studied in Bayesian reasoning tasks, we present the first systematic investigation of how presentation formats influence information search decisions. Four experiments were conducted across …

Diagnostic causal reasoning with verbal information

In diagnostic causal reasoning, the goal is to infer the probability of causes from one or multiple observed effects. Typically, studies investigating such tasks provide subjects with precise quantitative information regarding the strength of the …

Heuristics: fast, frugal, and smart

Informationssuche im Mathematikunterricht der Grundschule: Zahlenspiele und Fabelwesen als mögliches Lern-Lehrarrangement. [Information search in mathematics teaching in primary school: Number games and mythical creatures as a possible learning-teaching arrangement]

Gute Fragen zu stellen, ist eine grundlegende Kompetenz für das Lösen alltäglicher Aufgaben. Der vorliegende Beitrag skizziert eine spielerische Moglichkeit, anhand von gut überlegten Fragen zu verschiedenen Merkmalen und Fabelwesen erste Kenntnisse …

Moral hindsight

How are judgments in moral dilemmas affected by uncertainty, as opposed to certainty? We tested the predictions of a consequentialist and deontological account using a hindsight paradigm. The key result is a hindsight effect in moral judgment. …