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That's interesting. Unfortunately the text isn't free. Do they have any guess as to why? My guess is that there's some fairly simple heuristic that gives the
by andrewcooke 17y ago
That's interesting. Unfortunately the text isn't free. Do they have any guess as to why?
My guess is that there's some fairly simple heuristic that gives the right answer, which birds are using but which we, for some reason, are not. Either we lost / never had the instinctive heuristic or it gets vetoed by confused conscious thought.
- ableal 17y ago> or it gets vetoed by confused conscious thought Bingo, IMHO. The "stand back, I'm applying rational thought to this" attitude has made quite a few victims ... Also known as "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Our overdeveloped pattern-recognition engine is not as good (and unbiased) at rational thought as we like to believe.
- argv_empty 17y agoFrom the abstract, Across experiments, the probability of gaining reinforcement for switching and staying was manipulated, and birds adjusted their probability of switching and staying to approximate the optimal strategy. From that, I'd guess that the birds are making their selection based on experience about what has and hasn't worked in the recent past.