Answer:
Human bounded rationality requires people to perform their tasks using only the knowledge they have, however much that may depart from the reality it purports to describe. Moreover, the inferences they will draw from their knowledge will be severely limited by their computational capabilities. Finally, of the body of knowledge they have stored in memory, only a fraction—often a very small fraction—of the knowledge potentially relevant to a particular task will be evoked initially, or even in the course of time, by the presentation of the task and the instructions.
Under these circumstances, to understand and predict behavior requires us to understand and predict what part of the information in memory will actually be evoked and applied in the course of task performance. What will subjects attend to and when? Under what circumstances will shifts of attention occur and evoke new information or lead to the loss of information previously evoked? A theory of cognition must incorporate a theory of attention, and, as we saw earlier, attention is closely linked to motivation and even to emotion.
In the remainder of this chapter, we undertake to make these ideas more concrete by showing how they enter into the modeling of behavior observed in a well-known piece of experimental work on concept attainment and categorization. As the basis for our modeling, we use the EPAM system, which, first developed about 1959 to account for a number of the phenomena of rote verbal learning, has been extended in the succeeding 35 or more years to account for a progressively wider range of phenomena of perception and memory.
Explanation:
decision making in which the processes used are rational within the constraints imposed by (a) limitations in the individual's knowledge; (b) human cognitive limitations generally; and (c) empirical factors arising from the complex, real-life situations in which decisions have to be made.
