Adapting the Adaptive Toolbox: The computational cost of building rational behavior
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2015-08-31
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en
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Abstract
One of the main challenges in cognitive science is to explain how people make reasonable
inferences in daily life. Theories that attempt to explain this either fail to capture inference
in its full generality or they seem to postulate intractable computations. One account
that seems to aspire to achieve generality without running into the problem of computational
intractability is “the adaptive toolbox” by Gigerenzer and Todd (1999b). This theory
proposes that humans have a toolbox, adapted through learning and/or evolution to the
environment. Such a toolbox contains heuristics, each of them computationally tractable,
and a selector which selects a heuristic for every situation so that the toolbox can solve the
type of inference problems that people solve in their daily life. In this project we investigate
whether such a toolbox can have adapted and under what circumstances. We propose
a formalization of an adaptive toolbox and two formalizations of the adaptation process
and analyze them with computational complexity theory. Our results show that applying a
toolbox is doable in reasonable amount of time, but adapting a toolbox can only be done
efficiently when certain restrictions are placed on the environment. If these restrictions
occur in the environment and the adaptation processes exploit them humans could have
indeed adapted an adaptive toolbox.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen