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by psyklic 2797 days ago
These are structured as: Do you choose (A) alone, or do you choose (A) and (B)? (A) is often benign and (B) is often something the subject thinks is a good fit. So, in some ways these seem like "trick questions" - I wonder what happens if both options are benign. As the Wikipedia article mentions, in the typical case the subject may end up choosing to use an easy heuristic rather than thinking hard about the actual definition of probability and such.

There are other ways the brain could be Bayesian though. For example, at the lowest level our neurons could use Bayesian inference. How this manifests itself at much higher levels such as with language and planning might be difficult to predict.

1 comments

I would describe that heuristic as Bayesian, since the subject evaluates the prior evidence for each option, and then chooses the one with the most supporting information, instead of considering the options' logical or mathematical properties.