[...from the chapter] The probabilistic mind has to mirror the structure of the probabilistic world. Because the mind reflects the environment, the topic of the present volume should not be misunderstood as referring only to intrapsychic processes within individual organisms' brains or minds....

Fiedler and Freytag (2004) proposed an alternative pathway to contingency assessment in terms of pseudocontingencies (PCs). PCs reflect the utilization of base-rate information in the formation of contingency judgments. Here, we introduce an instantiation of the phenomenon based on the mere...

Predicting criterion events based on probabilistic predictor events, humans often lend excessive weight to predictor event information and insufficient weight to criterion event base-rates. Using the matching-to-sample paradigm established in studies on experience-based contingency learning in...

Conditional probability judgments of rare events are often inflated when some meaningful relation exists between the condition and the low-baserate event. While traditional explanations assume that human judgments are generally insensitive to statistical baserates, more recent evidence shows...

The term pseudocontingency (PC) denotes the logically unwarranted inference of a contingency between two variables X and Y from information other than pairs of xi, yi observations, namely, the variables’ univariate baserates as assessed in one or more ecological contexts. We summarize recent...

This paper focuses on behavioral routines in adaptive decision making - an issue which has fairly been neglected to date. In two successive experiments, participants worked on recurrent, multiattribute choice problems. In the first experiment, we induced routines by relying upon the human...

Based on the classical biological Monod model a so called double-limited self-purification model working in an aggregate water resource is constructed. From this model we derive a stationary selfpurification function and three conditions for ecological sustainable development. Copyright Kluwer...