Fast and frugal use of cue direction in states of limited knowledge
Magnus Persson, Peter Juslin · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2000
An exemplar-based algorithm, PROBEX, (Juslin & Persson, 1999) is shown to make robust decisions in multiple-cue inference tasks when very few exemplars are known.We demonstrate the crucial role of knowledge of cue directions for performance and confront PROBEX with an artificial environment specifically construed to favor a non-compensatory algorithm like Take The Best (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996).PROBEX is demonstrated to perform well even in these unfavorable conditions.The explanation for the robust performance is that PROBEX approximates Dawes Rule by using information of the cue directions for all cues, while yet making few a priori assumptions about the structure of the environment.