Modeling Cognitive Parsimony with a Demand Selection Task

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The law of less work (Hull, 1943) is our natural tendency given two alternatives with equal incentives to pick the less demanding one. This notion also appears in the field of judgment and decision making (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), it is referred to as internal cost of effort. Cognitive parsimony is our tendency to favour low-effort strategies that help us to decide faster and simple strategies to approach a complex problem. An experimental paradigm for this phenomenon has been developed by Kool, McGuire, Rosen, & Botvinick (2010) and referred to as the demand selection task. In this poster, we present a model of this task developed in the ACT-R architecture (Anderson, 2007), which offers an hypothesis as to which cognitive mechanisms might participate in this phenomenon.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of ICCM 2016 - 14th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling
EditorsDavid Reitter, Frank E. Ritter
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University
Pages276-278
Number of pages3
ISBN (Electronic)9780998508207
StatePublished - 2016
Event14th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, ICCM 2016 - University Park, United States
Duration: Aug 3 2016Aug 6 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of ICCM 2016 - 14th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling

Conference

Conference14th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, ICCM 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityUniversity Park
Period8/3/168/6/16

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Modeling and Simulation

Keywords

  • Cognitive modeling
  • Cognitive parsimony
  • Demand selection

Disciplines

  • Psychology
  • Social and Behavioral Sciences

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