Cognition Workshop 6/2: Dr. Jonathan Phillips

How we know what not to think

Humans have an unrivaled ability to represent and reason about unrealized possible actions – the vast infinity of things that were not (or have not yet been) chosen. This capacity is central to the most impressive of our capacities: causal reasoning, planning, linguistic communication, moral judgment, etc. Nevertheless, not a great deal is known about how we select possible actions that are worth considering from the infinity of unrealized actions that are better left ignored. I’ll review research across the cognitive sciences, and argue that the possible actions considered by default are those that are both likely to occur and generally valuable. I’ll then point to a unified theory of why, proposing that (i) across diverse cognitive tasks, the possible actions we consider are biased towards those of general practical utility, and (ii) a plausible primary function for this mechanism resides in decision making. I’ll end by presenting new empirical evidence for such a mechanism in decision making.

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