Optimal predictions in everyday cognition

Human perception and memory are often explained as optimal statistical inferences that are informed by accurate priorprobabilities. In contrast, cognitive judgments are usually viewed as following error-prone heuristics that are insensitive to priors. We examined the optimality of human cognition in a more realistic context than typicallaboratory studies, asking people to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday phenomena suchas human life spans and the box-office take of movies. Our results suggest that everyday cognitive judgments follow the same optimal statistical principles as perception and memory, and reveal a close correspondence between people's implicit probabilistic models and the statistics of the world.