The wisdom of individuals: Exploring people's knowledge about everyday events using iterated learning

Stephan Lewandowsky, Thomas L. Griffiths, Michael L. Kalish

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

49 Scopus citations

Abstract

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called "iterated learning," in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people's predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box office gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method to discriminate between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difficult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reflect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)969-998
Number of pages30
JournalCognitive Science
Volume33
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2009
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Bayesian models of cognition
  • Iterated learning
  • Optimal predictions

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Artificial Intelligence

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