Adaptive decision-making requires that environmental contingencies between decision options and their relative advantages and disadvantages be assessed accurately and quickly. The research presented in this article addresses the challenging notion that contingencies may be more visible from...

Regularities in the environment are used to decide what course of action to take and how to prepare for future events. Here we focus on the utilization of regularities for prediction and argue that the commonly considered measure of regularity - the strength of the contingency between antecedent...

The information used in reaching a decision between alternatives is often gleaned through samples drawn from the distributions of their outcomes. Since in most cases it is the direction of the difference in value, rather than its magnitude, that is of primary interest, the decision maker may...

[...from the chapter] In the present article, we delineate a different approach, which is by no means inconsistent, but largely overlaps with the aforementioned definitions. However, our approach is simpler and refrains from a number of rather strong assumptions to which other conceptions...