ArticleNature human behaviour2022
Human inference reflects a normative balance of complexity and accuracy.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Suboptimal human inference reflects an efficient and flexible information bottleneck.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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- Cortex-wide Dynamics of Internal Decisions About Behavioral Context.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- How Occam's razor guides human decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Confirmation bias through selective readout of information encoded in human parietal cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Confirmation Bias through Selective Readout of Information Encoded in Human Parietal Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Understanding learning through uncertainty and bias.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- Broadscale dampening of uncertainty adjustment in the aging brain.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Understanding dual process cognition via the minimum description length principle.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Consistency within change: Evaluating the psychometric properties of a widely used predictive-inference task.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Individual differences in belief updating and phasic arousal are related to psychosis proneness.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Entropy and Cross-Level Orderliness in Light of the Interconnection between the Neural System and Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Aligning statistical models with inference goals in the neuroscience of language: A dual-dependency taxonomy.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We must often infer latent properties of the world from noisy and changing observations. Complex, probabilistic approaches to this challenge such as Bayesian inference are accurate but cognitively demanding, relying on extensive working memory and adaptive processing. Simple heuristics are easy to implement but may be less accurate. What is the appropriate balance between complexity and accuracy? Here we model a hierarchy of strategies of variable complexity and find a power law of diminishing returns: increasing complexity gives progressively smaller gains in accuracy. The rate of diminishing returns depends systematically on the statistical uncertainty in the world, such that complex strategies do not provide substantial benefits over simple ones when uncertainty is either too high or too low. In between, there is a complexity dividend. In two psychophysical experiments, we confirm specific model predictions about how working memory and adaptivity should be modulated by uncertainty.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.