Talk:Cognition August2018/@comment-35453425-20180528203135

Thanks Will. I have some thoughts for the group on the Cantlon paper, and this area in general. I agree, this is a cool new idea to test. I like what gets done, usually. I know some work with apes has shown 1) they use "intuitive probabilities" to decide which container to choose, and 2) they also can go against the experienced probabilities if the human chooser seems to pick the minority objects more often than expected. BUT - my question is whether this is really about estimating probabilities, or about summed frequency experiences in a much more associative framework. In other words, if you show me two lottery machines, and I then see that one keep spitting out about 9 orange balls for each blue (a big winner!), and the other spits out about 50/50 ratio, and I clearly choose lottery 1 to play, am I using probabilities? Am I really thinking "90% chance to win versus 50% chance to win" or am I saying "that one has more orange in it," or even "I have a stronger association of orange balls with that one." Should we even care? Is this all the same thing? I don't know, and maybe this paper gets at that somehow (please tell me if it does, and I will read it carefully). But, I suspect we are leaning toward high level descriptions of mathematical faculties where lower-level descriptions might still be best. Perhaps it is not intuitive probabilities being estimated, but raw numbers of orange and blue being compared. We have known for a long time that animals can look at patches of mixed food and determine which has more of the preferred food type, but that is not the same as estimating probabilities, I don't think.

Thoughts from the rest of you?