DIEP seminar by Eugenio Piasini
Occam’s razor is the principle that, all else being equal, simpler explanations should be preferred over more complex ones. This principle is thought to play a role in human perception and decision-making, but the nature of our presumed preference for simplicity and its underlying computational mechanisms are unclear. In this talk I will describe recent behavioral experiments performed by our group, guided by formal theories of statistical model selection. We show that, when faced with uncertain evidence, human subjects exhibit preferences for specific, theoretically grounded forms of simplicity of the alternative explanations. These preferences persist even when they are maladaptive, and their dependence on the amount of available data suggests the involvement of lower-level cognitive processes related to numerosity perception. Thus, these preferences are not merely optimizations for particular task conditions but rather a more general feature of human decision-making. Our results imply that principled notions of statistical model complexity have direct, quantitative relevance to human behavior.
If you wish to attend this seminar online, please send an email to r.lier@uva.nl to receive the zoom-link.
Eugenio Piasini got his PhD at University College London, after which he did postdoctoral work at the Italian Institute of Technology and at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently associate professor in the Neuroscience department at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), in Trieste, Italy. In his research, he is interested in the computational principles that underlie the ability of the animal brain to perform efficient inference and prediction under tight resource constraints. He studies behavior and cognition in animals and humans, and information processing in neuronal circuits.