{"pk":27881,"title":"A Rational Distributed Process-level Account of Independence Judgment","subtitle":null,"abstract":"It is inconceivable how chaotic the world would look to hu-mans, faced with innumerable decisions a day to be made un-der uncertainty, had they been lacking the capacity to distin-guish the relevant from the irrelevant—a capacity which com-putationally amounts to handling probabilistic independencerelations. The highly parallel and distributed computationalmachinery of the brain suggests that a satisfying process-levelaccount of human independence judgment should also mimicthese features. In this work, we present the first rational, dis-tributed, message-passing, process-level account of indepen-dence judgment, called D∗. Interestingly, D∗ shows a curi-ous, but normatively justified tendency for quick detection ofdependencies, whenever they hold. Furthermore, D∗ outper-forms all the previously proposed algorithms in the AI litera-ture in terms of worst-case running time, and a salient aspectof it is supported by recent work in neuroscience investigatingpossible implementations of Bayes nets at the neural level. D∗exemplifies how the pursuit of cognitive plausibility can leadto the discovery of state-of-the-art algorithms with appealingproperties, and its simplicity makes D∗ potentially a good can-didate as a teaching tool.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Ratinoal process models"},{"word":"Distributed computing"},{"word":"Probabilistic independence judgment"},{"word":"Pearl's d-separation"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/529609rz","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Ardavan","middle_name":"S","last_name":"Nobandegani","name_suffix":"","institution":"McGill University","department":""},{"first_name":"Ioannis","middle_name":"N","last_name":"Psaromiligkos","name_suffix":"","institution":"McGill University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27881/galley/17519/download/"}]}