Vague heuristics

Even when they are defined with precision, one can often read and hear judgments about the vagueness of heuristics in debates about heuristic reasoning. This opinion is not just frequent but also quite reasonable. In fact, during the 1990s, there was a certain controversy concerning this topic that confronted two of the leading groups in the field of heuristic reasoning research, each of whom held very different perspectives. In the present text, we will focus on two of the papers published in Psychological Review, wherein the arguments of each of these groups were presented:

Vagueness in referring expressions of quantity: effects on the audience

NLG systems that generate natural language text from numerical input data must decide be- tween alternative surface linguistic forms for the natural language output. When using refer- ring expressions to identify numerical quantities, the system must decide between vague and crisp surface forms of the referring expression. Ideally, the system would be equipped with heuristics that it could use to make these decisions in the way that best suits the audience: however there is currrently little empirical data to draw on concerning the differential audience benefits of vague and crisp surface forms. In this paper we describe a series of experiments that investigate whether different surface forms affect the audience’s cognitive load in differ- ent ways. We estimate cognitive load by measuring the response latencies in a forced choice referent identification task in which we vary the surface form of the referring expression that constitutes the instruction in the task. We find that the pattern of audience responses across the series of experiments provides little support for the cost reduction hypothesis that vague surface forms should place fewer cogntive demands on the audience than crisp surface forms: instead the results support the view that referring expressions that contain numerals are more taxing for the audience than referring expressions that use natural language quantifiers, at least in the context of a forced choice referent identification task. We offer this work as an initial foray into the provision of heuristics to augment NLG systems with audience-sensitivity

A Theory of Vague Expected Utility

We propose a new theory of choice between lotteries, which combines an 'economic’ view of decision making - based on a rational, though incomplete, ordering - with a 'psychological’ view - based on heuristics. This theory can explain observed violations of EU theory, namely all cyclical patterns of choice as well as violations of independence.incomplete preference relation; cyclical preferences; expected utility

Heuristic usability evaluation on games: a modular approach

Heuristic evaluation is the preferred method to assess usability in games when experts conduct this evaluation. Many heuristics guidelines have been proposed attending to specificities of games but they only focus on specific subsets of games or platforms. In fact, to date the most used guideline to evaluate games usability is still Nielsen’s proposal, which is focused on generic software. As a result, most evaluations do not cover important aspects in games such as mobility, multiplayer interactions, enjoyability and playability, etc. To promote the usage of new heuristics adapted to different game and platform aspects we propose a modular approach based on the classification of existing game heuristics using metadata and a tool, MUSE (Meta-heUristics uSability Evaluation tool) for games, which allows a rebuild of heuristic guidelines based on metadata selection in order to obtain a customized list for every real evaluation case. The usage of these new rebuilt heuristic guidelines allows an explicit attendance to a wide range of usability aspects in games and a better detection of usability issues. We preliminarily evaluate MUSE with an analysis of two different games, using both the Nielsen’s heuristics and the customized heuristic lists generated by our tool.Unión Europea PI055-15/E0

Which heuristics can aid financial-decision-making?

© 2015 Elsevier Inc. We evaluate the contribution of Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, often in association with his late co-author Amos Tversky, to the development of our understanding of financial decision-making and the evolution of behavioural finance as a school of thought within Finance. Whilst a general evaluation of the work of Kahneman would be a massive task, we constrain ourselves to a more narrow discussion of his vision of financial-decision making compared to a possible alternative advanced by Gerd Gigerenzer along with numerous co-authors. Both Kahneman and Gigerenzer agree on the centrality of heuristics in decision making. However, for Kahneman heuristics often appear as a fall back when the standard von-Neumann-Morgenstern axioms of rational decision-making do not describe investors' choices. In contrast, for Gigerenzer heuristics are simply a more effective way of evaluating choices in the rich and changing decision making environment investors must face. Gigerenzer challenges Kahneman to move beyond substantiating the presence of heuristics towards a more tangible, testable, description of their use and disposal within the ever changing decision-making environment financial agents inhabit. Here we see the emphasis placed by Gigerenzer on how context and cognition interact to form new schemata for fast and frugal reasoning as offering a productive vein of new research. We illustrate how the interaction between cognition and context already characterises much empirical research and it appears the fast and frugal reasoning perspective of Gigerenzer can provide a framework to enhance our understanding of how financial decisions are made