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    How good is your evidence and how would you know?

    Hahn, Ulrike and Merdes, C. and von Sydow, M. (2018) How good is your evidence and how would you know? Topics in Cognitive Science 10 (4), pp. 660-678. ISSN 1756-8765.

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    Abstract

    This paper examines the basic question of how we can come to form accurate beliefs about the world when we do not fully know how good or bad our evidence is. Here we show, using simulations with otherwise optimal agents, the cost of misjudging the quality of our evidence, and compare different strategies for correctly estimating that quality, such as outcome, and expectation-based updating. We identify conditions under which misjudgment of evidence quality can nevertheless lead to accurate beliefs, as well as those conditions where no strategy will help. These results indicate both where people will nevertheless succeed and where they will fail when information quality is degraded.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This is the peer reviewed version of the article, which has been published in final form at the link above. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Cognition, Computation and Modelling, Centre for
    Depositing User: Ulrike Hahn
    Date Deposited: 24 Jul 2018 10:50
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:43
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/23210

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