Lieder, F. and Griffiths, T. L. (2020). Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43, e1. DOI 10.1017/S0140525X1900061X
Key takeaways
Read in full (NOTE-873). Resource rationality defines the right cognitive mechanism as the one, among those a brain can execute, that maximizes expected utility of its result minus the expected opportunity cost of the time and resources it uses (Eq. 3), averaged over the environments consistent with what is known (Eq. 4); resource-rational analysis is a five-step iterate-and-refine method for deriving process models from that objective. The objective is per episode. It has no separate terms for storing a result, retrieving it later, or its going stale: the value of what a computation leaves behind is folded into the utility of the episode’s result, and the cost of finding the heuristic in the first place is assigned to evolution and learning and left out. Reuse appears only in the review, qualitatively: habits as reused action sequences, Dasgupta et al. 2018’s memorized hypotheses, Howes et al. 2016’s memory-load choice (the review’s “memorize-or-look-up”), and “cognitive prostheses”. The framework is offered as a methodological device, not a claim that people are optimal.
Why this is here
The owner, after the cockpit reading (LIT-1066): “amortized retrieval is actually a kind of amortized computation. there’s probably a clearer relationship here that I imagine has likely been clarified/formalized at some point in the 30 years since the cockpit essay was published.” Registered with six others for QUESTION-095.
The framework in which computation is chosen against its cost. The reading (NOTE-873) narrows this: the objective is per episode, with no terms for precomputation, storage, retrieval or staleness, and offloading is formalized only in a commentary, as QUESTION-095 asks.
Note of 2026-10-15: Howes et al. 2016, read
This reading called Howes et al. 2016 (LIT-1062) “the head-versus-world trade”, following the source’s description. The task has no look-up: names are seen once and cannot be revisited, and the choice is how long a list to take per trial. There is no parametric model; the prediction for each person is the list length with the best reward rate in their own measured data. Capacity and look-up time are not parameters, and raising the cost of misremembering did not change choices. It is a trade of memory load against reward rate, not of memory against the world.