Optimal Policies, Degradation, and Cognition: Comments

Abstract

Needless to say, decisions man makes in real life are, as a rule, dynamic, in the sense that outcomes he encounters after a decision is made are again new decision situations. To cope with these sequentially organized decision problems effectively, man has to organize his plan for his future decisions into a workable strategy. Ever since the emergence of cognitive psychology in recent years, psychologists have paid considerable attention to the cognitive organization of the informational input man, and with fruitful returns. No comparable attention has been given, however, to the other side of human activity, i. e the organization of the output of man or how he organizes his behavior and decisions in an appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate) way to match them with the structure of the given situation. This is obviously no less important human competence than the one shown on the input side.