There's indeed a paper showing that's roughly what's going on: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.69.2578 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/view

There's indeed a paper showing that's roughly what's going on: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.69.2578 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.69.2... >Human perception and memory are often explained as optimal statistical inferences, informed by accurate prior probabilities. In contrast, cognitive judgments are usually viewed as following error-prone heuristics, insensitive to priors. We examined the optimality of human cognition in a more realistic context than typical laboratory studies, asking people to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday phenomena such as human life spans and the box-office take of movies. Our results suggest that everyday cognitive judgments follow the same optimal statistical principles as perception and memory, and reveal a close correspondence between people’s implicit probabilistic models and the statistics of the world.