Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Christina Moutsiana  (pictured above), who is Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Westminster. Her research focuses on perceptual and cognitive biases which she investigates using a variety of neuroscience tools, behavioural paradigms, and psychophysics. In this post she discusses some of her recent research on belief updating and brain architecture (see Moutsiana et al. 2015 for more details). We make decisions every day, some of which are critical to our health and wellbeing. These decisions are driven by the beliefs we hold. But do we form beliefs in an accurate manner that allow us to avoid harm and maximize reward? Cognition is not impervious to error, especially when emotion comes into play. One of the most robust cognitive biases is asymmetric belief updating; the tendency for healthy individuals to alter beliefs about their future to a greater extent in response to good information compared with bad information. Decision ...

This post is by Predrag Teovanović (pictured above), graduate student at the University of Belgrade. In this post he summarises his recent paper ‘ Individual Differences in Cognitive Biases: Evidence Against One-Factor Theory of Rationality ’, co-authored with Goran Knežević and Lazar Stankov, published in Intelligence. If there is a minimal definition of rational behavior, it can be found here . From the normative standpoint, rational behaviour is hard (if not impossible) to maintain all the time. Hence, we satisfice by trying to optimize the boundaries of bounded rationality at the intersection of our own resources (time, information, money, and cognitive capacities) and environmental demands. Cognitive biases (CBs) emerge in that junction.   Since what defines rational behaviour depends on both environment and organism, and since specific CBs arise in different environments - it is reasonable not to expect from CBs to be highly related to individual differences ...