Compound cue processing in linearly and nonlinearly separable environments

Take-the-best (TTB) is a fast and frugal heuristic for paired comparison that has been proposed as a model of bounded rationality. This heuristic has been criticized for not taking compound cues into account to predict a criterion, although such an approach is sometimes required to make accurate predictions. By means of computer simulations, it is shown that TTB-configural, an extension of TTB that processes compound cues, can outperform both TTB and a more demanding benchmark. Moreover, a review of experimental evidence suggests that people actually use TTB-configural when equipped with the corresponding knowledge about the causal structure of the environment

The robustness of the Take The Best Configural Heuristic in linearly and nonlinearly separable environments

Take The Best (TTB) is a fast and frugal heuristic for paired comparison that has been proposed as a model of bounded rationality. This heuristic does not take compound cues into account to predict the criterion. However, causal knowledge about the relationship between a criterion and several cues may suggest that processing cues as configurations could be adaptive in a certain environment. In a series of simulations, we show that an extension of TTB, namely TTB-Configural, outperforms both the more frugal TTB and a more demanding benchmark. Moreover, we review empirical evidence that people process cues as configurations when equipped with the corresponding knowledge about the causal structure