Past and Present Environments: The Evolution of Decision Making

The human mind is filled with evolved decision mechanisms designed to meet adaptively important goals. We outline a framework for studying those mechanisms from an evolutionary cognitive psychology perspective, which emphasizes the role of the environment in shaping organisms' decision strategies. We hold that decision strategies often take the form of simple decision rules constructed from building blocks that draw on evolved capacities, all of which fit to particular information structures in the environment. We illustrate these ideas with research examples from our work on human foraging cognition: deciding when to leave a resource patch, searching for information in memory, predicting when a sequence of events will stop or continue, and detecting sequential dependencies when simultaneously foraging for multiple resources.