Lael J Schooler

Publications (24)64.89 Total impact

• Article: Mapping the Structure of Semantic Memory.

  Ana Sofia Morais, Henrik Olsson, Lael J Schooler
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  ABSTRACT: Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual's semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals have a small-world structure with short distances between words and high clustering. The distribution of links follows a power law truncated by an exponential cutoff, meaning that most words are poorly connected and a minority of words has a high, although bounded, number of connections. Existing aggregate networks mirror the individual link distributions, and so they are not scale-free, as has been previously assumed; still, there are properties of individual structure that the aggregate networks do not reflect. A simulation of the new sampling process suggests that it can uncover the true structure of an individual's semantic memory.
  Cognitive Science A Multidisciplinary Journal 11/2012; · 2.59 Impact Factor
• Source

  Available from: apa.org

  Article: Cognitive niches: an ecological model of strategy selection.

  Julian N Marewski, Lael J Schooler
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  ABSTRACT: How do people select among different strategies to accomplish a given task? Across disciplines, the strategy selection problem represents a major challenge. We propose a quantitative model that predicts how selection emerges through the interplay among strategies, cognitive capacities, and the environment. This interplay carves out for each strategy a cognitive niche, that is, a limited number of situations in which the strategy can be applied, simplifying strategy selection. To illustrate our proposal, we consider selection in the context of 2 theories: the simple heuristics framework and the ACT-R (adaptive control of thought-rational) architecture of cognition. From the heuristics framework, we adopt the thesis that people make decisions by selecting from a repertoire of simple decision strategies that exploit regularities in the environment and draw on cognitive capacities, such as memory and time perception. ACT-R provides a quantitative theory of how these capacities adapt to the environment. In 14 simulations and 10 experiments, we consider the choice between strategies that operate on the accessibility of memories and those that depend on elaborate knowledge about the world. Based on Internet statistics, our model quantitatively predicts people's familiarity with and knowledge of real-world objects, the distributional characteristics of the associated speed of memory retrieval, and the cognitive niches of classic decision strategies, including those of the fluency, recognition, integration, lexicographic, and sequential-sampling heuristics. In doing so, the model specifies when people will be able to apply different strategies and how accurate, fast, and effortless people's decisions will be.
  Psychological Review 07/2011; 118(3):393-437. · 7.76 Impact Factor
• Source

  Available from: mpg.de

  Article: A signal-detection analysis of fast-and-frugal trees.

  Shenghua Luan, Lael J Schooler, Gerd Gigerenzer
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  ABSTRACT: Models of decision making are distinguished by those that aim for an optimal solution in a world that is precisely specified by a set of assumptions (a so-called "small world") and those that aim for a simple but satisfactory solution in an uncertain world where the assumptions of optimization models may not be met (a so-called "large world"). Few connections have been drawn between these 2 families of models. In this study, the authors show how psychological concepts originating in the classic signal-detection theory (SDT), a small-world approach to decision making, can be used to understand the workings of a class of simple models known as fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs). Results indicate that (a) the setting of the subjective decision criterion in SDT corresponds directly to the choice of exit structure in an FFT; (b) the sensitivity of an FFT (measured in d') is reflected by the order of cues searched and the properties of cues in an FFT, including the mean and variance of cues' individual d's, the intercue correlation, and the number of cues; and (c) compared with the ideal and the optimal sequential sampling models in SDT and a majority model with an information search component, FFTs are extremely frugal (i.e., do not search for much cue information), highly robust, and well adapted to the payoff structure of a task. These findings demonstrate the potential of theory integration in understanding the common underlying psychological structures of apparently disparate theories of cognition.
  Psychological Review 03/2011; 118(2):316-38. · 7.76 Impact Factor
• Source

  Available from: Daniel G. Goldstein

  Article: The recognition heuristic: a review of theory and tests.

  Thorsten Pachur, Peter M Todd, Gerd Gigerenzer, Lael J Schooler, Daniel G Goldstein
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  ABSTRACT: The recognition heuristic is a prime example of how, by exploiting a match between mind and environment, a simple mental strategy can lead to efficient decision making. The proposal of the heuristic initiated a debate about the processes underlying the use of recognition in decision making. We review research addressing four key aspects of the recognition heuristic: (a) that recognition is often an ecologically valid cue; (b) that people often follow recognition when making inferences; (c) that recognition supersedes further cue knowledge; (d) that its use can produce the less-is-more effect - the phenomenon that lesser states of recognition knowledge can lead to more accurate inferences than more complete states. After we contrast the recognition heuristic to other related concepts, including availability and fluency, we carve out, from the existing findings, some boundary conditions of the use of the recognition heuristic as well as key questions for future research. Moreover, we summarize developments concerning the connection of the recognition heuristic with memory models. We suggest that the recognition heuristic is used adaptively and that, compared to other cues, recognition seems to have a special status in decision making. Finally, we discuss how systematic ignorance is exploited in other cognitive mechanisms (e.g., estimation and preference).
  Frontiers in psychology. 01/2011; 2:147.
• Conference Proceeding: Does the structure of causal models predict information search?

  Ana Sofia Morais, Henrik Olsson, Lael J Schooler
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  ABSTRACT: This paper investigates whether the structure of people’s knowledge of causal relations between the features of categories predicts how they search for information in a categorization task. Participants were asked to draw a causal model that described how the symptoms of depression are causally related to one another, and to estimate the strengths of those relationships. Additionally, they were asked to categorize a series of patients as suffering from depression or not, after searching their symptoms. The results showed that the structurally more important a symptom was in a causal model, the more frequently and the earlier in search it was inspected. Also, a measure of feature importance that ignored causal strengths accounted for search behavior at least as well as the weighted version of the same measure.
  European Perspectives on Cognitive Science: Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Science; 01/2011
• Source

  Available from: unibas.ch

  Article: The robust beauty of ordinary information.

  Konstantinos V Katsikopoulos, Lael J Schooler, Ralph Hertwig
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  ABSTRACT: Heuristics embodying limited information search and noncompensatory processing of information can yield robust performance relative to computationally more complex models. One criticism raised against heuristics is the argument that complexity is hidden in the calculation of the cue order used to make predictions. We discuss ways to order cues that do not entail individual learning. Then we propose and test the thesis that when orders are learned individually, people's necessarily limited knowledge will curtail computational complexity while also achieving robustness. Using computer simulations, we compare the performance of the take-the-best heuristic--with dichotomized or undichotomized cues--to benchmarks such as the naïve Bayes algorithm across 19 environments. Even with minute sizes of training sets, take-the-best using undichotomized cues excels. For 10 environments, we probe people's intuitions about the direction of the correlation between cues and criterion. On the basis of these intuitions, in most of the environments take-the-best achieves the level of performance that would be expected from learning cue orders from 50% of the objects in the environments. Thus, ordinary information about cues--either gleaned from small training sets or intuited--can support robust performance without requiring Herculean computations.
  Psychological Review 10/2010; 117(4):1259-66. · 7.76 Impact Factor
• Article: It just felt right: the neural correlates of the fluency heuristic.

  Kirsten G Volz, Lael J Schooler, D Yves von Cramon
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  ABSTRACT: Simple heuristics exploit basic human abilities, such as recognition memory, to make decisions based on sparse information. Based on the relative speed of recognizing two objects, the fluency heuristic infers that the one recognized more quickly has the higher value with respect to the criterion of interest. Behavioral data show that reliance on retrieval fluency enables quick inferences. Our goal with the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to isolate fluency-heuristic-based judgments to map the use of fluency onto specific brain areas that might give a better understanding of the heuristic's underlying processes. Activation within the claustrum for fluency heuristic decisions was found. Given that claustrum activation is thought to reflect the integration of perceptual and memory elements into a conscious gestalt, we suggest this activation correlates with the experience of fluency.
  Consciousness and Cognition 09/2010; 19(3):829-37. · 2.31 Impact Factor
• Source

  Available from: Wolfgang Gaissmaier

  Article: From recognition to decisions: extending and testing recognition-based models for multialternative inference.

  Julian N Marewski, Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Lael J Schooler, Daniel G Goldstein, Gerd Gigerenzer
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  ABSTRACT: The recognition heuristic is a noncompensatory strategy for inferring which of two alternatives, one recognized and the other not, scores higher on a criterion. According to it, such inferences are based solely on recognition. We generalize this heuristic to tasks with multiple alternatives, proposing a model of how people identify the consideration sets from which they make their final decisions. In doing so, we address concerns about the heuristic's adequacy as a model of behavior: Past experiments have led several authors to conclude that there is no evidence for a noncompensatory use of recognition but clear evidence that recognition is integrated with other information. Surprisingly, however, in no study was this competing hypothesis--the compensatory integration of recognition--formally specified as a computational model. In four studies, we specify five competing models, conducting eight model comparisons. In these model comparisons, the recognition heuristic emerges as the best predictor of people's inferences.
  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 06/2010; 17(3):287-309. · 2.61 Impact Factor
• Article: Ways of probing situated concepts.

  Ana Sofia Morais, Henrik Olsson, Lael J Schooler
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  ABSTRACT: Two ways of eliciting conceptual content have been to instruct participants to list the intrinsic properties that concept exemplars possess or to report any thoughts that come to mind about the concept. It has been argued that the open, unconstrained probe is better able to elicit the situational information that concepts contain. We evaluated this proposal in two experiments comparing the two probes with regard to the content that they yield for object concepts at the superordinate and basic levels. The results showed that the open probe was better able to elicit situated conceptual knowledge and point out differences in the representations of superordinate and basic concepts.
  Behavior Research Methods 02/2010; 42(1):302-10. · 2.12 Impact Factor
• Source

  Available from: Jörg Rieskamp

  Article: Forgetting constrains the emergence of cooperative decision strategies.

  Jeffrey R Stevens, Jenny Volstorf, Lael J Schooler, Jörg Rieskamp
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  ABSTRACT: Theoretical studies of cooperative behavior have focused on decision strategies that depend on a partner's last choices. The findings from this work assume that players accurately remember past actions. The kind of memory that these strategies employ, however, does not reflect what we know about memory. Here, we show that human memory may not meet the requirements needed to use these strategies. When asked to recall the previous behavior of simulated partners in a cooperative memory task, participants performed poorly, making errors in 10-24% of the trials. Participants made more errors when required to track more partners. We conducted agent-based simulations to evaluate how well cooperative strategies cope with error. These simulations suggest that, even with few errors, cooperation could not be maintained at the error rates demonstrated by our participants. Our results indicate that the strategies typically used in the study of cooperation likely do not reflect the underlying cognitive capacities used by humans and other animals in social interactions. By including unrealistic assumptions about cognition, theoretical models may have overestimated the robustness of the existing cooperative strategies. To remedy this, future models should incorporate what we know about cognition.
  Frontiers in psychology. 01/2010; 1:235.
• Source

  Available from: Rui Mata

  Article: Cognitive aging and the adaptive use of recognition in decision making.

  Thorsten Pachur, Rui Mata, Lael J Schooler
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  ABSTRACT: The recognition heuristic, which predicts that a recognized object scores higher on some criterion than an unrecognized one, is a simple inference strategy and thus an attractive mental tool for making inferences with limited cognitive resources--for instance, in old age. In spite of its simplicity, the recognition heuristic might be negatively affected in old age by too much knowledge, inaccurate memory, or deficits in its adaptive use. Across 2 studies, we investigated the impact of cognitive aging on the applicability, accuracy, and adaptive use of the recognition heuristic. Our results show that (a) young and old adults' recognition knowledge was an equally useful cue for making inferences about the world; (b) as with young adults, old adults adjusted their use of the recognition heuristic between environments with high and low recognition validities; and (c) old adults, however, showed constraints in their ability to adaptively suspend the recognition heuristic on specific items. Measures of fluid intelligence mediated these age-related constraints.
  Psychology and Aging 12/2009; 24(4):901-15. · 2.73 Impact Factor
• Article: The smart potential behind probability matching.

  Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Lael J Schooler
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  ABSTRACT: Probability matching is a classic choice anomaly that has been studied extensively. While many approaches assume that it is a cognitive shortcut driven by cognitive limitations, recent literature suggests that it is not a strategy per se, but rather another outcome of people's well-documented misperception of randomness. People search for patterns even in random sequences, which results in probability matching at the outcome level. Previous studies have supported this by the finding that distracting people with a secondary verbal working memory task presumably prevents the pattern search, resulting in more maximizing behavior that is considered more rational. The current paper demonstrates with two experiments that there is actually truth in both accounts. For some participants, probability matching indeed seems to be the result of a cognitive shortcut, a simple "win-stay, lose-shift" strategy, and in one experiment identified these as participants low in working memory capacity. For others, however, a potentially smart pattern search strategy underlies probability matching. These probability matchers (who still look irrational in the absence of patterns) actually have a higher chance of finding a pattern if one exists. Contrary to the almost uniformly negative perception of probability matching, we therefore conclude that there can be a potentially smart strategy behind probability matching.
  Cognition 12/2008; 109(3):416-22. · 3.16 Impact Factor
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  Available from: unibas.ch

  Article: Fluency heuristic: a model of how the mind exploits a by-product of information retrieval.

  Ralph Hertwig, Stefan M Herzog, Lael J Schooler, Torsten Reimer
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  ABSTRACT: Boundedly rational heuristics for inference can be surprisingly accurate and frugal for several reasons. They can exploit environmental structures, co-opt complex capacities, and elude effortful search by exploiting information that automatically arrives on the mental stage. The fluency heuristic is a prime example of a heuristic that makes the most of an automatic by-product of retrieval from memory, namely, retrieval fluency. In 4 experiments, the authors show that retrieval fluency can be a proxy for real-world quantities, that people can discriminate between two objects' retrieval fluencies, and that people's inferences are in line with the fluency heuristic (in particular fast inferences) and with experimentally manipulated fluency. The authors conclude that the fluency heuristic may be one tool in the mind's repertoire of strategies that artfully probes memory for encapsulated frequency information that can veridically reflect statistical regularities in the world.
  Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition 10/2008; 34(5):1191-206. · 2.85 Impact Factor
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  Available from: upenn.edu

  Article: An ecological perspective to cognitive limits: Modeling environment-mind interactions with ACT-R

  Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Lael J. Schooler, Rui Mata
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  ABSTRACT: Contrary to the common belief that more information is always better, Gigerenzer et al.\ (1999) showed that simple decision strategies which rely on little information can be quite successful. The success of simple strategies depends both on bets about the structure of the environment and on the core capacities of the human mind, such as recognition memory (Gigerenzer, 2004). However, the interplay between the environment and the mind's core capacities has rarely been precisely modeled. We illustrate how these environment-mind interactions could be formally modeled within the cognitive architecture ACT-R (J. R. Anderson et al., 2004). ACT-R is an integrated theory of mind that is tuned to the statistical structure of the environment, and it can account for a variety of phenomena such as learning, problem solving, and decision making. Here, we focus on studying decision strategies and show how the success of theses strategies in particular environments depends on characteristics of core cognitive capacities, such as recognition and short term memory.
  Judgment and decision making 02/2008; 3(March):278-291. · 2.62 Impact Factor
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  Available from: Jörg Rieskamp

  Article: The aging decision maker: cognitive aging and the adaptive selection of decision strategies.

  Rui Mata, Lael J Schooler, Jörg Rieskamp
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  ABSTRACT: Are older adults' decision abilities fundamentally compromised by age-related cognitive decline? Or can they adaptively select decision strategies? One study (N = 163) investigated the impact of cognitive aging on the ability to select decision strategies as a function of environment structure. Participants made decisions in either an environment that favored the use of information-intensive strategies or one favoring the use of simple, information-frugal strategies. Older adults tended to (a) look up less information and take longer to process it and (b) use simpler, less cognitively demanding strategies. In accordance with the idea that age-related cognitive decline leads to reliance on simpler strategies, measures of fluid intelligence explained age-related differences in information search and strategy selection. Nevertheless, both young and older adults seem to be equally adapted decision makers in that they adjust their information search and strategy selection as a function of environment structure, suggesting that the aging decision maker is an adaptive one.
  Psychology and Aging 01/2008; 22(4):796-810. · 2.73 Impact Factor
• Article: An ecological perspective to cognitive limits

  Gaissmaier Wolfgang, Lael J. Schooler, Mata Rui
  [show abstract] [hide abstract]
  ABSTRACT: Contrary to the common belief that more information is always better, Gigerenzer et al. (1999) showed that simple decision strategies which rely on little information can be quite successful. The success of simple strategies depends both on bets about the structure of the environment and on the core capacities of the human mind, such as recognition memory (Gigerenzer, 2004). However, the interplay between the environment and the mind's core capacities has rarely been precisely modeled. We illustrate how these environment-mind interactions could be formally modeled within the cognitive architecture ACT-R (J. R. Anderson et al., 2004). ACT-R is an integrated theory of mind that is tuned to the statistical structure of the environment, and it can account for a variety of phenomena such as learning, problem solving, and decision making. Here, we focus on studying decision strategies and show how the success of theses strategies in particular environments depends on characteristics of core cognitive capacities, such as recognition and short term memory.
  Judgment and Decision Making. 01/2008;
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  Available from: Markus Raab

  Article: Why you think milan is larger than modena: neural correlates of the recognition heuristic.

  Kirsten G Volz, Lael J Schooler, Ricarda I Schubotz, Markus Raab, Gerd Gigerenzer, D Yves von Cramon
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  ABSTRACT: When ranking two alternatives by some criteria and only one of the alternatives is recognized, participants overwhelmingly adopt the strategy, termed the recognition heuristic (RH), of choosing the recognized alternative. Understanding the neural correlates underlying decisions that follow the RH could help determine whether people make judgments about the RH's applicability or simply choose the recognized alternative. We measured brain activity by using functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants indicated which of two cities they thought was larger (Experiment 1) or which city they recognized (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, increased activation was observed within the anterior frontomedian cortex (aFMC), precuneus, and retrosplenial cortex when participants followed the RH compared to when they did not. Experiment 2 revealed that RH decisional processes cannot be reduced to recognition memory processes. As the aFMC has previously been associated with self-referential judgments, we conclude that RH decisional processes involve an assessment about the applicability of the RH.
  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12/2006; 18(11):1924-36. · 5.18 Impact Factor
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  Available from: Wolfgang Gaissmaier

  Article: Simple predictions fueled by capacity limitations: when are they successful?

  Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Lael J Schooler, Jörg Rieskamp
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  ABSTRACT: Counterintuitively, Y. Kareev, I. Lieberman, and M. Lev (1997) found that a lower short-term memory capacity benefits performance on a correlation detection task. They assumed that people with low short-term memory capacity (low spans) perceived the correlations as more extreme because they relied on smaller samples, which are known to exaggerate correlations. The authors consider, as an alternative hypothesis, that low spans do not perceive exaggerated correlations but make simpler predictions. Modeling both hypotheses in ACT-R demonstrates that simpler predictions impair performance if the environment changes, whereas a more exaggerated perception of correlation is advantageous to detect a change. Congruent with differences in the way participants make predictions, 2 experiments revealed a low capacity advantage before the environment changes but a high capacity advantage afterward, although this pattern of results surprisingly only existed for men.
  Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition 10/2006; 32(5):966-82. · 2.85 Impact Factor
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  Available from: unibas.ch

  Article: How forgetting aids heuristic inference.

  Lael J Schooler, Ralph Hertwig
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  ABSTRACT: Some theorists, ranging from W. James (1890) to contemporary psychologists, have argued that forgetting is the key to proper functioning of memory. The authors elaborate on the notion of beneficial forgetting by proposing that loss of information aids inference heuristics that exploit mnemonic information. To this end, the authors bring together 2 research programs that take an ecological approach to studying cognition. Specifically, they implement fast and frugal heuristics within the ACT-R cognitive architecture. Simulations of the recognition heuristic, which relies on systematic failures of recognition to infer which of 2 objects scores higher on a criterion value, demonstrate that forgetting can boost accuracy by increasing the chances that only 1 object is recognized. Simulations of the fluency heuristic, which arrives at the same inference on the basis of the speed with which objects are recognized, indicate that forgetting aids the discrimination between the objects' recognition speeds.
  Psychological Review 08/2005; 112(3):610-28. · 7.76 Impact Factor
• Article: Efficiently measuring recognition performance with sparse data.

  Lael J Schooler, Richard M Shiffrin
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  ABSTRACT: We examine methods for measuring performance in signal-detection-like tasks when each participant provides only a few observations. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that standard statistical techniques applied to a d' analysis can lead to large numbers of Type I errors (incorrectly rejecting a hypothesis of no difference). Various statistical methods were compared in terms of their Type I and Type II error (incorrectly accepting a hypothesis of no difference) rates. Our conclusions are the same whether these two types of errors are weighted equally or Type I errors are weighted more heavily. The most promising method is to combine an aggregate d' measure with a percentile bootstrap confidence interval, a computer-intensive nonparametric method of statistical inference. Researchers who prefer statistical techniques more commonly used in psychology, such as a repeated measures t test, should use gamma (Goodman & Kruskal, 1954), since it performs slightly better than or nearly as well as d'. In general, when repeated measures t tests are used, gamma is more conservative than d': It makes more Type II errors, but its Type I error rate tends to be much closer to that of the traditional .05 alpha level. It is somewhat surprising that gamma performs as well as it does, given that the simulations that generated the hypothetical data conformed completely to the d' model. Analyses in which H--FA was used had the highest Type I error rates. Detailed simulation results can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/Schooler-BRM-2004.zip.
  Behavior Research Methods 02/2005; 37(1):3-10. · 2.12 Impact Factor