This is the second post based on Pohl’s paper, “On the Use of Recognition in Inferential Decision Making.” Pohl looks at what have come to be seen as weaknesses of the recognition heuristic.
Recognition as a memory-based process
While acknowledging that recognition should generally be treated as a continuous variable, Goldstein and Gigerenzer focused on the outcome of this recognition process, which is either “recognized” or “not recognized” with only a small and negligible gray zone of uncertainty in between. Accordingly, the quality of these subjective recognition judgments, that is, whether
they were true or not or with what confidence, was originally not considered. Meanwhile, some researchers have asked whether and how the recognition process itself possibly affects subsequent inferences.
