Mind, rationality, and cognition: An interdisciplinary debate

An ecological assessment of decision-making under risk and ambiguity through the virtual serious game Kalliste Decision Task

Traditional methods for evaluating decision-making provide valuable insights yet may fall short in capturing the complexity of this cognitive capacity, often providing insufficient for the multifaceted nature of decisions. The Kalliste Decision Task (KDT) is introduced as a comprehensive, ecologically valid tool aimed at bridging this gap, offering a holistic perspective on decision-making. In our study, 81 participants completed KDT alongside established tasks and questionnaires, including the Mixed Gamble Task (MGT), Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), and Stimulating & Instrumental Risk Questionnaire (S&IRQ). They also completed the User Satisfaction Evaluation Questionnaire (USEQ). The results showed excellent usability, with high USEQ scores, highlighting the user-friendliness of KDT. Importantly, KDT outcomes showed significant correlations with classical decision-making variables, shedding light on participants' risk attitudes (S&IRQ), rule-based decision-making (MGT), and performance in ambiguous contexts (IGT). Moreover, hierarchical clustering analysis of KDT scores categorized participants into three distinct profiles, revealing significant differences between them on classical measures. The findings highlight KDT as a valuable tool for assessing decision-making, addressing limitations of traditional methods, and offering a comprehensive, ecologically valid approach that aligns with the complexity and heterogeneity of real-world decision-making, advancing research and providing insights for understanding and assessing decision-making across multiple domains.

Embodied and embedded ecological rationality: A common vertebrate mechanism for action selection underlies cognition and heuristic decision-making in humans

The last common ancestor shared by humans and other vertebrates lived over half a billion years ago. In the time since that ancestral line diverged, evolution by natural selection has produced an impressive diversity—from fish to birds to elephants—of vertebrate morphology; yet despite the great species-level differences that otherwise exist across the brains of many animals, the neural circuitry that underlies motor control features a functional architecture that is virtually unchanged in every living species of vertebrate. In this article, we review how that circuitry facilitates motor control, trial-and-error-based procedural learning, and habit formation; we then develop a model that describes how this circuitry (embodied in an agent) works to build and refine sequences of goal-directed actions that are molded to fit the structure of the environment (in which the agent is embedded). We subsequently review evidence suggesting that this same functional circuitry became further adapted to regulate cognitive control in humans as well as motor control; then, using examples of heuristic decision-making from the ecological rationality tradition, we show how the model can be used to understand how that circuitry operates analogously in both cognitive and motor domains. We conclude with a discussion of how the model encourages a shift in perspective regarding ecological rationality’s “adaptive toolbox”—namely, to one that views heuristic processes and other forms of goal-directed cognition as likely being implemented by the same neural circuitry (and in the same fashion) as goal-directed action in the motor domain—and how this change of perspective can be useful.

Affective Attitudes in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Dynamics of Negative Emotions and a Sense of Threat in Poles in the First Wave of the Pandemic

For millions of people, the COVID-19 pandemic situation and its accompanying restrictions have been a source of threat and confrontation with negative emotions. The pandemic's universal and long-term character, as well as the ensuing drastic limitation of control over one's life, have made it necessary to work out adaptive strategies that would reduce negative experiences and eventually lead to the restoration of well-being. The aim of this research was to identify strategies that people use in response to a long-term threat that restore affective balance and a subjective sense of security. We registered selected manifestations of affective reactions to the pandemic situation. The researchers focused on the dynamics of changes in the areas of (1) experienced negative emotions (asked in an indirect way) and (2) a subjective feeling of threat regarding the pandemic (in three different contexts: Poland, Europe, and worldwide) during the first phase of the pandemic in Poland. It was expected that both the negative emotions and the sense of threat would decrease with time. In addition, it was anticipated that the physical distance would modify the assessment of the situation as threatening depending on the geographical proximity: in Poland, Europe, and worldwide. We used the mixed quasi-experimental design in the series of four studies conducted by Internet in March, May, June, and July 2020. The intensity of negative emotions and the sense of threat caused by the pandemic situation in Poland, Europe, and worldwide were measured. Despite the objective number of confirmed COVID-19 cases during each of the stages of the study, both the intensity of emotions attributed by participants as well as the feeling of threat were found to have decreased. In addition, surprisingly, a reversed effect of the distance was revealed: namely, a sense of threat experienced towards distant locations (Europe and the world) was found to be more acute when compared with the threat experienced in Poland. The obtained results are interpreted as a manifestation of adaptive perception of the threat that lies beyond one's control, which takes the form of unconscious, biased distortions: unrealistic optimism. The decrease in the intensity of negative emotions explains unrealistic absolute optimism, while the perception of the situation in Poland as less threatening than in Europe and around the world is predicted by unrealistic comparative optimism.

A Generative View of Rationality and Growing Awareness†

In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as "intuitive statisticians" while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as "probing organisms." We first highlight how ecological rationality's focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: (a) the problem of cue salience, and (b) the problem of cue uncertainty. We highlight these problems by revisiting the statistical and cue-based logic that underlies ecological rationality, which originate from the misapplication of concepts in psychophysics (e.g., signal detection, just-noticeable-differences). We then work through the most popular experimental task in the ecological rationality literature-the city size task-to illustrate how psychophysical assumptions have informally been linked to ecological rationality. After highlighting these problems, we contrast ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Generative rationality builds on biology-in contrast to ecological rationality's focus on statistics. We argue that in uncertain environments cues are rarely given or available for statistical processing. Therefore we focus on the psychogenesis of awareness rather than psychophysics of cues. For any agent or organism, environments "teem" with indefinite cues, meanings and potential objects, the salience or relevance of which is scarcely obvious based on their statistical or physical properties. We focus on organism-specificity and the organism-directed probing that shapes awareness and perception. Cues in teeming environments are noticed when they serve as cues-for-something, requiring what might be called a "cue-to-clue" transformation. In this sense, awareness toward a cue or cues is actively "grown." We thus argue that perception might more productively be seen as the presentation of cues and objects rather than their representation. This generative approach not only applies to relatively mundane organism (including human) interactions with their environments-as well as organism-object relationships and their embodied nature-but also has significant implications for understanding the emergence of novelty in economic settings. We conclude with a discussion of how our arguments link with-but modify-Herbert Simon's popular "scissors" metaphor, as it applies to bounded rationality and its implications for decision making in uncertain, teeming environments.

More Thumbs Than Rules: Is Rationality an Exaptation?

The literatures on bounded and ecological rationality are built on adaptationism-and its associated modular, cognitivist and computational paradigm-that does not address or explain the evolutionary origins of rationality. We argue that the adaptive mechanisms of evolution are not sufficient for explaining human rationality, and we posit that human rationality presents exaptive origins, where exaptations are traits evolved for other functions or no function at all, and later co-opted for new uses. We propose an embodied reconceptualization of rationality-embodied rationality-based on the reuse of the perception-action system, where many neural processes involved in the control of the sensory-motor system, salient in ancestral environments have been later co-opted to create-by tinkering-high-level reasoning processes, employed in civilized niches.

Embodying Bounded Rationality: From Embodied Bounded Rationality to Embodied Rationality

Views of embodied cognition vary in degree of radicalism. The goal of this article is to explore how the range of moderate and radical views of embodied cognition can inform new approaches to rationality. In this exploration, Herbert Simon's bounded rationality is taken for its complete disembodiedness as a reference base against which to measure the increasing embodied content of new approaches to rationality. We use the label “embodied bounded rationality” to explore how moderate embodiment can reform Simon's bounded rationality while, on the opposite side of the embodied spectrum, the label “embodied rationality” is employed to explore how radical embodiment can more deeply transform the idea of what is rational. In between the two poles, the labels “body rationality” and “extended rationality” are introduced to explore how also intermediate embodiment can fruitfully inform the research on rationality.

Positive emotion induction improves cardiovascular coping with a cognitive task

Feeling positive emotions seems to favour an adaptive cardiovascular response (greater heart rate variability, HRV), associated with improved cognitive performance. This study aims to test whether the induction of a positive emotional state produce such cardiovascular response and therefore, enhance coping and performance in Tower of Hanoi (ToH). Forty-two Participants were randomly distributed into two groups (Experimental and Control). Experimental group was subjected to the evocation of a memory of success, while control group was subjected to an attentional task before performing ToH. Heart Rate Variability (HRV), activity of the zygomatic major muscle (ZEMG) and emotions were measured. Emotional induction increased ZEMG activity, feelings of emotional valence and HRV, but the performance in ToH was not different from control. Experiencing positive emotions seems to favour an adaptive psychophysiological response when faced with a complex cognitive task. These results are discussed in relation to clinical practice and health.

Cognitiva Speciebus: Towards a Linnaean Approach to Cognition

Research points to the limitations of approaches to decision-making, that rest on general 'Newtonian principles' derived from unitary a priori conceptions of rationality. To understand how the mind exploits environments, we instead propose a process of more open-ended discovery and systematization in the mold of Linnaeus's famous taxonomy of plants.

People as Intuitive Scientists: Reconsidering Statistical Explanations of Decision Making

A persistent metaphor in decision-making research casts people as intuitive statisticians. Popular explanations based on this metaphor assume that the way in which people represent the environment is specified and fixed a priori. A major flaw in this account is that it is not clear how people know what aspects of an environment are important, how to interpret those aspects, and how to make decisions based on them. We suggest a theoretical reorientation away from assuming people's representations towards a focus on explaining how people themselves specify what is important to represent. This perspective casts decision makers as intuitive scientists able to flexibly construct, modify, and replace the representations of the decision problems they face.

The Network Structure of Decision-Making Competence in Chinese Adults

Decision-making competence refers to the ability to make better decisions, as defined by decision-making principles posited by models of rational choice. The adult decision-making competence (A-DMC) scale is a relatively mature evaluation tool used for decision-making competence. However, the A-DMC is yet far from other mature psychological evaluation tools, and especially the structure of A-DMC remains unclear. In the current study, we estimated a regularized partial correlation network of decision-making competence in a Chinese sample consisting of 339 adults who were evaluated by the A-DMC, and then the centrality indicators were calculated. The results revealed that all nodes of the decision-making competence networks are positively associated, except for the association of resistance to framing (RF) and resistance to sunk costs (SC). The strongest edge was between RF and applying decision rules (DR; regularized partial correlation = 0.37). The centrality indicators of RF and applying DR were highest, revealing that these two variables may play important roles in the decision-making competence network. Our study conceptualizes the decision-making competence from network perspectives, so as to provide some insights for future researches.

Familiarity-Matching: An Ecologically Rational Heuristic for the Relationships-Comparison Task

Previous studies have shown that people often use heuristics in making inferences and that subjective memory experiences, such as recognition or familiarity of objects, can be valid cues for inferences. So far, many researchers have used the binary choice task in which two objects are presented as alternatives (e.g., "Which city has the larger population, city A or city B?"). However, objects can be presented not only as alternatives but also in a question (e.g., "Which country is city X in, country A or country B?"). In such a situation, people can make inferences based on the relationship between the object in the question and each object given as an alternative. In the present study, we call this type of task a "relationships-comparison task." We modeled the three inference strategies that people could apply to solve it (familiarity-matching [FM; a new heuristic we propose in this study], familiarity heuristic [FH], and knowledge-based inference [KI]) to examine people's inference processes. Through Studies 1, 2, and 3, we found that (a) people tended to rely on heuristics, and that FM (inferences based on similarity in familiarity between objects) well explained participants' inference patterns; (b) FM could work as an ecologically rational strategy for the relationships-comparison task since it could effectively reflect environmental structures, and that the use of FM could be highly replicable and robust; and (c) people could sometimes use a decision strategy like FM, even in their daily lives (consumer behaviors). The nature of the relationships-comparison task and human cognitive processes is discussed.