The Interpretation of Heuristics based on the Maximum Entropy Principle

摘要

The usage of heuristics in human cognition is an ubiquitous phenomenon, especially when one is facing high uncertainty. In certain situations, we tend to avoid the formal approach of decision making, and choose to act intuitively according to pragmatic and heuristic simplifications such as considering only the most important alternatives and omitting the others. In this paper, we investigate the cognitive architecture that is more likely to yield a heuristic process, in light of the maximum entropy principle. Our main result is the elaboration of a heuristic model based on a specific graphical representation, as well as its interpretation based on the maximal entropy principle.