When The Brain Decides
Every day we have to make decisions that involve evaluating or choosing between options, often without much information to go on. So how we do it? How do we prevent analysis paralysis?
Psychological theory suggests that we often rely on the recognition heuristic, choosing the option that we recognize over the one we don’t. So, as psychological scientist Christian Frings points out, if we have to predict whether Roger Federer or Michael Berrer will win a tennis match, we’ll probably stick with Federer because he’s a well-known name. We seem to have an innate preference for the familiar and research suggests that the recognition heuristic usually works in our favor, at least when it comes to things like predicting tennis matches.
But, according to his colleague Timm Rosburg, research still hasn’t determined whether it’s really “pure recognition” or something else that drives our preference for familiar over unknown options. So Rosburg, Frings and memory researcher Axel Mecklinger at Saarland University designed a study to explore the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie the recognition heuristic. Their findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Existing research has already established that the familiarity component of recognition memory is represented by specific brain activity that can be recorded using electroencephalography (EEG) as early as 300 to 450 milliseconds (ms) after someone is exposed to a familiar object. So Rosburg and his colleagues decided to examine whether this same brain activity is associated with performance on the city-size comparison task, a task that is associated with the recognition heuristic. Participants were presented with pairs of city names and were asked to decide which city in the pair is larger. The authors found that they could indeed predict which city the participant chose based solely on brain activity in the 300-450 ms time window.
By connecting the behavioral processes associated with the recognition heuristic to the brain markers associated with familiarity-based memory, the authors were able to establish that the recognition heuristic really does seem to depend on pure recognition, or familiarity. Rosburg says that this kind of knowledge “allows us to understand both deficient decision making and the benefits of heuristics.
What Is Heuristics - News
Rosburg says that this kind of knowledge “allows us to understand both deficient decision making and the benefits of heuristics.” While the recognition heuristic may allow us to make decisions quickly and efficiently, it may not always lead us down the
Readers just don't know in advance what's worth paying for, and there are lots of heuristics that help distinguish worthy from unworthy texts. Is the book by an author you've heard of? An author you've read? An author you've seen reviewed?
According to Malwarebytes CEO Marcin Kleczynski, companies today need security defenses that combine traditional signature-based approaches with behavioral and heuristics-based approaches to security that make it easier to defend against modern malware
Text is summarised into new, coherent content that is easily understandable for a reader and is in a relatively formal register. trimit uses a wide variety of heuristics and variables in editing the content to convey the maximum amount of information
There's plenty on offer here: Windows-specific tweaks (auto heuristics, auto tuning), the full range of TCP/IP, WinSock and DNS settings, and even some useful browser-specific tweaks for IE, Firefox and Opera. No Chrome support yet, but that's still an
Showalter Group Blog: Amy Live & Uncut
Those of you who have hired us for our grassroots advocacy workshops know about the prevalence and power of heuristic persuasion techniques, as well as how to combat heuristic decision making on the part of legislators and their staff. Kristina Miler (not Miller) of the University of Illinois is one of the first researchers to examine how “political and legislative elites” use heuristics to recall information presented by constituents. All grassroots professionals and lobbyists should be aware of Miler’s findings.
Heuristics are mental shortcuts, and their use is rooted firmly in the psychological literature. Heuristics are an efficient way for anyone to make decisions (although there are of course disadvantages to this approach), and legislators and their staff are no different than the rest of us humans when it comes to using mental shortcuts. This research sought to find out what factors encourage legislative staff to use heuristics in recalling information from constituents.
Miler conducted research with 41 congressional offices. Her team interviewed legislative staff who were responsible for environmental issues, as the issue in question was a legislative proposal affecting wetlands policy. The study sample of congressional offices was selected to represent current political party, seniority, region and committee membership structures.
Their findings are below. Please remember as you review this list that it relates to information recall only – it is only one part of the persuasion puzzle. (Of which my colleague Dr. Kelton Rhoads has determined there are not “6 easy principles” or “10 tips”, but rather about 100 tactics you can use depending on the situation and influence prospect. Successful influence is customized!)
How do “legislative elites” recall your information?
Frequently presented information is more easily recalled. Familiarity of the issue as it relates to major constituent groups is more easily recalled. Issue salience. The more vivid the issue, the more it is, in the researcher’s words, “overvalued” by staff, which is why it’s more easily remembered. Pre-existing attitudes – Is the information being presented consistent with the staffer’s belief system? If so, staffers judge the information as more important and also “overvalue” it.What Is Heuristics - Bookshelf
Machine learning, an artificial intelligence approach
The correction is to modify the heuristic rule that proposed the incorrect hypothesis to check that aspect of the device before proposing the fault. ...Heuristics and biases, the psychology of intuitive judgement
PROTOTYPE HEURISTICS AND THE NEGLECT OF EXTENSION In this section, we offer a common account of three superficially dissimilar judgmental tasks: (1) ...The Steiner tree problem
This heuristic, which is designated PPB, has the same probabilistic ... 2.4 Other Heuristics There are other heuristics that do not easily fit in the ...Artificial evolution, 8th international conference, Evolution Artificielle, EA 2007 : Tours, France, October 29-31, 2007 : revised selected papers
Generating SAT Local-Search Heuristics Using a GP Hyper-Heuristic ... The aim is to obtain “disposable” heuristics which are evolved and used for a specific ...A Behavioral Theory of Elections
This takes us to the second topic: the notion of heuristics. 1.2 Heuristics Although there is no unique agreed-upon definition in the cognitive sciences, ...Detect Articles Directory
Heuristic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The most fundamental heuristic is trial and error, which can be used ... Because heuristics are fallible, it is important to understand their limitations. ...
What Is Heuristics?
Heuristics are a set of rules that someone or something follows in order to reach an objective. The word is commonly used relating to programming computers and ...
heuristics: Definition from Answers.com
heuristics ( hyu̇′ristiks ) ( psychology ) The study of the mental processes involved in problem
Heuristics
Heuristics - 0... in advance what's worth paying for, and there are lots of heuristics that help distinguish worthy from unworthy texts. Is the book by an author ...
Heuristics
Heuristics, and "what to do if you don't know what to do" ... What is a heuristic? "Relating to or using a problem-solving technique in which the most appropriate solution ...