Ecological Rationality: Intelligence in the World explores how people can be effective decision makers by using simple heuristics that fit well into the structure of the environment. When we wield the right tool from the mind’s adaptive toolbox for a particular situation, we can make good choices with little information or computation. Thus, simple strategies excel by exploiting the reliable patterns in the world. Heuristics are not good or bad, “biased” or “unbiased,” on their own, but only in relation to the setting in which they are used. The authors demonstrate this principle through case studies of heuristics and environments fitting together to produce good decisions, in situations including sports competitions, the search for a parking space, business group meetings, and doctor/patient interactions. The message of Ecological Rationality is to study mind and environment in tandem. Intelligence is not only in the mind but also in the world, captured in the structures of information around us.

The interdisciplinary research presented in this book, by turns theoretical, empirical, and applied, will be interesting and inspiring for all those concerned with how people make decisions. With specific examples in a variety of domains, it shows psychologists, economists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists how to study the mind together with the decision environment, and the perils of ignoring their vital interaction. Furthermore, this book provides guidance to practitioners who aim to design environments and institutions that help people make better choices.

Frederick II of Prussia knew that it wouldn’t be sufficient for a good king to exert control over his subjects’ bodies, but that he should also conquer their hearts. In (early) modern times, monarchs had to rule in a manner that led people to obey through love, not through fear and pressure. This was dictated by the theory of state. In practice though, what about a king who had never been known to possess a mild temper or a gentle attitude? The book analyses Frederick’s concept of power as well as the implementation of his emotional practices within this concept. It shows the enlightened absolutist’s methods in looking for consent and the affection of his subjects who in their turn took advantage of his endeavors. They imposed conditions, formulated expectations and in cases when the king ignored them they reacted disappointedly. Even before today’s media society – as the book shows – the communication of power worked in both directions. In the eighteenth century and in completely different political circumstances, we discover the beginnings of an emotion policy that has left its permanent mark on the modern era

Recent evidence indicates experience-dependent brain volume changes in humans, but the functional and histological nature of such changes is unknown. Here, we report that adult men performing a cognitively demanding spatial navigation task every other day over 4 months display increases in hippocampal N-acetylaspartate (NAA) as measured with magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Unlike measures of brain volume, changes in NAA are sensitive to metabolic and functional aspects of neural and glia tissue and unlikely to reflect changes in microvasculature. Training-induced changes in NAA were, however, absent in carriers of the Met substitution in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene, which is known to reduce activity-dependent secretion of BDNF. Among BDNF Val homozygotes, increases in NAA were strongly related to the degree of practice-related improvement in navigation performance and normalized to pretraining levels 4 months after the last training session. We conclude that changes in demands on spatial navigation can alter hippocampal NAA concentrations, confirming epidemiological studies suggesting that mental experience may have direct effects on neural integrity and cognitive performance. BDNF genotype moderates these plastic changes, in line with the contention that gene–context interactions shape the ontogeny of complex phenotypes.

On the chilly Sunday morning of 10 January 2010, I went for a stroll around the famous Weißensee cemetery in Berlin. I had wanted to see it for a long time and had read about its history as one of Europe’s largest and most beautiful Jewish burial grounds. Like most visitors, I was stunned by its grandeur, which tells so much about Jewish Berliners’ sense of pride and the optimism they felt about the future during the Imperial Period. And I was, like most visitors, struck by the depressing sense of absence after the early 1940s, signalling the monstrous rupture of civilization that had originated in this city.

Two graves in particular captured my attention. One was owned by the Kuczynski family. It clearly dated from the early twentieth century and indicated the wealth and self-confidence of those who had commissioned its architectural layout. The name Kuczynski immediately brought to mind Jürgen Kuczynski (JK) whose books I had read as a student, and whom I had met in 1978 when he gave a talk at Bielefeld University. JK had been a well-known economic historian in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), whom I remembered for his bourgeois attire (he was always dressed in a three-piece suit) and his claim to have reconciled seemingly irreconcilable identities: a Marxist believer, a loyal Communist Party (SED) member, and a free-thinking mind. I looked more closely, but could not find his name among the gravestones. There was Wilhelm Kuczynski, who had died in 1918, his wife Lucy née Brandeis, and some others, but no Jürgen. I decided to look him up as soon as I got home and see if there were any connections.

Available evidence suggests that infants use adults’ social cues for learning by the second half of the first year of life. However, little is known about the short-term or long-term effects of joint attention interactions on learning and memory in younger infants. In the present study, 4-month-old infants were familiarized with visually presented objects in either of two conditions that differed in the degree of joint attention (high vs. low). Brain activity in response to familiar and novel objects was assessed immediately after the familiarization phase (immediate recognition), and following a 1-week delay (delayed recognition). The latency of the Nc component differentiated between recognition of old versus new objects. Pb amplitude and latency were affected by joint attention in delayed recognition. Moreover, the frequency of infant gaze to the experimenter during familiarization differed between the two experimental groups and modulated the Pb response. Results show that joint attention affects the mechanisms of long-term retention in 4-month-old infants. We conclude that joint attention helps children at this young age to recognize the relevance of learned items.

Young, middle-aged, and older raters (N=154) evaluated 1,026 prototypical facial poses of neutrality, happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness stemming from 171 young, middle-aged, and older posers. The majority of poses were rated as multi-faceted, that is, to comprise several expressions of varying intensities. Consistent with the notion of age-related increases in negativity–avoidance/positivity effects, crossed-random effects analyses showed an age-related decrease in the attributions of negative, but not positive and neutral, target expressions (that the poser intended to show), and an age-related increase in the attributions of positive and neutral, but not negative, non-target expressions (that the posers did not intend to show). Expressions were more difficult to read the older the posers, particularly for male posers. These age-of-poser effects were independent of the valence of the expression, but partly differed across age groups of raters. The study supports the idea of multi-dimensionality and age-dependency of emotion perception.

Empty human faces, without any sign of emotion, as the avant-la-lettre constructivist Kazimir Malevich painted them, invite us to think about emotions in a similarly constructivist mode. Emotions, this book argues, are historically variable and contingent. Even if men and women have always felt and shown emotions, they have differed in style, object, and valence. While certain emotions got lost in history, others rose to prominence, depending on political incentives, social challenges, and cultural choices. In European societies, honour and shame practices have fundamentally changed over the course of modernity, gradually losing their grip on people’s self-concept and behavior. At the same time, compassion and empathy have become crucial components of the modern “emotional self”. As much as they triggered a plethora of humanitarian activities and institutions, they also witnessed severe setbacks and obstacles.

Salthouse (2011) critically reviewed cross-sectional and longitudinal relations among adult age, brain structure, and cognition (ABC) and identified problems in interpretation of the extant literature. His review, however, missed several important points. First, there is enough disparity among the measures of brain structure and cognitive performance to question the uniformity of B and C vertices of the ABC triangle. Second, age differences and age changes in brain and cognition are often nonlinear. Third, variances and correlations among measures of brain and cognition frequently vary with age. Fourth, cross-sectional comparisons among competing models of ABC associations cannot disambiguate competing hypotheses about the structure and the range of directed and reciprocal relations between changes in brain and behavior.

We offer the following conclusions, based on these observations. First, individual differences among younger adults are not useful for understanding the aging of brain and behavior. Second, only multivariate longitudinal studies, age-comparative experimental interventions, and a combination of the two will deliver us from the predicaments of the ABC triangle described by Salthouse. Mediation models of cross-sectional data represent age-related differences in target variables but fail to approximate time-dependent relations; thus, they do not elucidate the dimensions and dynamics of cognitive aging.

How do people make decisions when time is limited, information unreliable, and the future uncertain? Based on the work of Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and with the help of colleagues around the world, the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Group has developed a research program on simple heuristics, also known as fast-and-frugal heuristics.

By providing a fresh look at how the mind works as well as the nature of rationality, the simple heuristics program has stimulated a large body of research, led to fascinating applications in diverse fields from law and medicine to business and sports, and instigated controversial debates in psychology, philosophy, and economics.

In a single volume, this text compiles key articles that have been published in journals across many disciplines. These articles present theory, real-world applications, and a sample of the large number of existing experimental studies that provide evidence for people's adaptive use of heuristics.

Feelings are as old as mankind. The knowledge about emotions and their value is changing along with people. The authors of the volume examine the changes in the knowledge on emotions in Europe from the eighteenth century. This knowledge was (and still is) related to fundamental questions regarding the human condition: Are feelings of mental or physical nature? Can emotions be interpreted? Do animals have feelings? Are women more emotional than men? Are there children’s and grown-ups’ emotions? Is it possible to "civilize feelings"? Can emotions cause illnesses? Are groups capable of emotions? Can feelings bond or divide? The historically changing answers to these questions demonstrate that the knowledge about emotions has always been closely linked with the social, cultural and political structures of modern societies.