Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 3, Issue 2, 1 February 1999, Pages 57-65
Journal home page for Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Review
Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(98)01273-XGet rights and content

Abstract

Rational analysis is an empirical program that attempts to explain the function and purpose of cognitive processes. This article looks back on a decade of research outlining the rational analysis methodology and how the approach relates to other work in cognitive science. We illustrate rational analysis by considering how it has been applied to memory and reasoning. From the perspective of traditional cognitive science, the cognitive system can appear to be a rather arbitrary assortment of mechanisms with equally arbitrary limitations. In contrast, rational analysis views cognition as intricately adapted to its environment and to the problems it faces.

Section snippets

Mechanistic and purposive explanation

A scientific explanation of psychological, biological, or social phenomena can take one of two complementary forms. The first is ‘mechanistic’. Phenomena are explained by analysing their internal causal structure. The second is ‘purposive’. The phenomena are explained in terms of their purpose: what problem they solve.

In biology, purposive explanation concerns the function of biological structures and processes (e.g. the function of the heart is to pump blood); and the same style of explanation

Memory

A ubiquitous finding in memory research is that memory fails gradually over time. This is typically assumed to be a side-effect of problems of storage or retrieval in the memory system. But perhaps the pattern of memory breakdown can be viewed as adaptive. Perhaps recent items are remembered better because they are more likely to be needed again soon1. For example, if the last time you read a fact about Iraq was one sentence ago, then it is likely that Iraq will be mentioned in the next

Reasoning

In the cognitive science of reasoning, approaches based on rational analysis have been developed in a number of areas. Indeed, in the study of reasoning there is some research implicitly adopting the rational analysis approach39 that predates Anderson and Milson’s1 paper. We focus on how rational analysis applies to the most controversial and heavily researched reasoning task, Wason’s selection task40, and then touch briefly on other important developments.

In the abstract selection task, people

Conclusion

Traditional cognitive psychology implicitly treats the cognitive system as a ragbag of arbitrary mechanisms, with arbitrary performance limitations. Little attention is given to why these mechanisms and limitations add up to a system that is so adaptively successful in coping with a complex and partially known world. Rational analysis aims to answer this question by identifying the problems that specific cognitive mechanisms face, and crucially by including the environment in which these

Outstanding questions

  • What are the limits of rational analysis? Can every successful aspect of cognition be explained rationally, or could some mechanisms ‘just work’ with no rational explanation63?

  • How far can rational analysis in cognitive science be integrated with related work in perception and motor control, such as Marr's15 ‘computational level’ of explanation, ‘ideal-observer’ models'64, and ‘task dynamics’65?

  • How does rational analysis relate to proposed cognitive architectures? We have seen that Anderson's

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank John R. Anderson and Gerd Gigerenzer for discussion of these ideas. We also thank David Over and the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on this article. Thanks especially to Jean Czerlinski for further discussions.

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