The Mind's Adaptive Toolbox

Making good decisions is challenging due to bounds on information, time, and computational resources, which complicate reckoning with risk and uncertainty. We argue that people meet this challenge by using simple yet often highly efficient decision-making rules—heuristics. ARC's aim is to identify and describe these heuristics, understand how they exploit environmental statistical properties, and examine how people adapt their use across different contexts. more

Learning—through, for instance, exploration, sampling, and information integration—is a key tool in the mind's adaptive toolbox, enabling people to infer environments' probabilistic structures and evaluate options. It can also involve deliberate ignorance, such as avoiding unreliable information or relying on the choice to not know in the service of emotion regulation or gaining a strategic advantage. ARC's aim is to identify the functions, mechanisms, benefits and costs associated with learning and deliberate ignorance. more

Collective intelligence highlights the social dimension of the mind's adaptive toolbox. Many decisions are made with and through others, involving shared information, social learning, and pooled cognitive resources, while navigating conflict and competing interests. Understanding the dynamics, opportunities, and pitfalls of collective decision-making is central to ARC's research on how minds adapt in social environments. more

The adaptive toolbox is ever evolving. Cognitive tools develop and change as internal resources—memory, knowledge, attentional capacities—grow or decline and as external demands shift. ARC aims to unravel how these changes unfold over the lifespan and as a function of experience, and how they shed light on time-honored questions such as the lifespan development of risk and epistemic preferences. more