An Adaptive Approach to Human Decision Making: Learning Theory, Decision Theory, and Human Performance

This article describes a general model of decision rule learning, the rule competition model, composed of 2 parts: an adaptive network model that describes how individuals learn to predict the payoffs produced by applying each decision rule for any given situation and a hill-climbing model that describes how individuals learn to fine tune each rule by adjusting its parameters. The model was tested and compared with other models in 3 experiments on probabilistic categorization. The first experiment was designed to test the adaptive network model using a probability learning task, the second was designed to test the parameter search process using a criterion learning task, and the third was designed to test both parts of the model simultaneously by using a task that required learning both category rules and cutoff criteria.