Departmental News
Reimer Co-Authors Study of Heuristics and Information Retrieval
Assistant professor Torsten Reimer is co-author of a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition. Named one of the top psychology journals of the 20th century in a 2001 study from Monitor on Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology is a premier journal in the field of experimental psychology.
The article, entitled "Fluency Heuristic: A Model of How the Mind Exploits a By-Product of Information Retrieval," appears in the September 2008 issues of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition.
Abstract: Boundedly rational heuristics for inference can be surprisingly accurate and frugal for several reasons. They can exploit environmental structures, co-opt complex capacities, and elude effortful search by exploiting information that automatically arrives on the mental stage. The fluency heuristic is a prime example of a heuristic that makes the most of an automatic by-product of retrieval from memory, namely, retrieval fluency. In 4 experiments, the authors show that retrieval fluency can be a proxy for real-world quantities, that people can discriminate between two objects' retrieval fluencies, and that people's inferences are in line with the fluency heuristic (in particular fast inferences) and with experimentally manipulated fluency. The authors conclude that the fluency heuristic may be one tool in the mind's repertoire of strategies that artfully probes memory for encapsulated frequency information that can veridically reflect statistical regularities in the world.
Citation: Hertwig, R., Herzog, S. M., Schooler, L. J., & Reimer, T. (2008). Fluency heuristic: A model of how the mind exploits a by-product of information retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 1191–1206.
