Abstract
Humans can exploit recognition memory as a simple cue for judgment. The utility of recognition depends on the interplay with the environment, particularly on its predictive power (validity) in a domain. It is, therefore, an important question whether people are sensitive to differences in recognition validity between domains. Strategic, intra-individual changes in the reliance on recognition have not been investigated so far. The present study fills this gap by scrutinizing within-person changes in using a frugal strategy, the recognition heuristic (RH), across two task domains that differed in recognition validity. The results showed adaptive changes in the reliance on recognition between domains. However, these changes were neither associated with the individual recognition validities nor with corresponding changes in these validities. These findings support a domain-adaptivity explanation, suggesting that people have broader intuitions about the usefulness of recognition across different domains that are nonetheless sufficiently robust for adaptive decision making. The analysis of metacognitive confidence reports mirrored and extended these results. Like RH use, confidence ratings covaried with task domain, but not with individual recognition validities. The changes in confidence suggest that people may have metacognitive access to information about global differences between task domains, but not to individual cue validities.
Highlights
Organisms have to make predictions and inferences in an inherently uncertain world
Can we observe some stability in the reliance on recognition, even when the validity of a cue changes dramatically?. We addressed these issues and set out to investigate adaptive use of the recognition heuristic (RH) within the same decisionmakers across two task domains that strongly differed in their recognition validity, using a modeling approach that provides estimates of individual parameters as well as their correlations
We report the medians of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samples
Summary
Organisms have to make predictions and inferences in an inherently uncertain world. An influential perspective on judgment and decision making suggests that humans achieve this by relying on available cues (pieces of information) that are only probabilistically related to some criterion in the. Elisa Filevich and Sebastian Horn contributed to this article. We thank Vahik Soghom and Ksenia Appelganc for help with data collection and for valuable comments. Recognition memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between familiar and novel items) provides a simple cue for inference that is retrieved rapidly and with little effort (e.g., Rosburg, Mecklinger, & Frings, 2011). Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) found that people frequently
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
