Diversity of Cognition: Decision Making

Flashcards covering the psychological and biological concepts of decision making, cognitive biases, and foraging theories discussed in the Diversity of Cognition lecture.

Homo Economicus

A theoretical model of a human being who acts only in their own interest (Individualism), calculates costs and benefits to optimize results (Optimization), and behaves with full rationality across all situations (Universality).

Temporal Discounting

The psychological phenomenon where individuals overvalue immediate rewards and devalue future rewards as a function of the expected delay before acquiring them.

Time Preference Reversal

The shift in preference to a delayed, larger reward when all options are pushed further into the future, despite the same temporal cost and benefit gap (e.g., preferring $105$ in $31$ days over $100$ in $30$ days).

Risk-Averse

A preference for a certain option over a risky option with variable outcomes, common in humans, dogs, cotton-top tamarins, and lemurs.

Risk-Seeking

A preference for a risky option with variable outcomes over a safe, certain option, observed in species such as rhesus macaques, chimpanzees, and bonobos.

Framing Effects

A cognitive bias where equivalent choices result in different behaviors depending on whether they are presented in terms of gains (leading to risk avoidance) or losses (leading to risk seeking).

Endowment Effect

The tendency to value an item more highly when it is possessed than when it is not, driven by the fact that the psychological weight of losing an item is greater than the gain of acquiring it.

Optimal Foraging Theory

A biological framework where animals maximize fitness by ensuring the net energy gain from food offsets the energy expended on travel and extraction time.

Marginal Value Theorem

A rule predicting that an animal will move to a new food patch when the net energy gain from the current patch falls below the average energy gain of the surrounding habitat.

Ideal Free Distribution Model

A model describing how group-foraging animals distribute themselves among patches such that the number of animals is proportional to the resources available at each patch.

Collective Decision Making

A process where group coordination is robust to individual perturbations, often requiring a critical mass or 'quorum' to move in a particular direction before the rest of the group follows.

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts or cognitive rules of thumb used to solve complex problems or make decisions when available information is incomplete or too demanding to process via algorithms.

Algorithms

Specific, logical procedures or sets of instructions that lead to a correct or optimal solution but are often lengthy and mentally demanding.

Ecological Rationality

The idea that information processing is limited in all species, necessitating the use of heuristics tailored to specific sensory information and ecological pressures rather than calculating every possible outcome.