I really doubt that same neural mechanism is involved. Like P= 0.0005. We’re dealing with totally different areas of the brain that evolved hundreds of millions of years apart. I’m not even sure I see an obvious sense in which the optical illusion corresponds to the cognitive bias.
I don’t think it’s mechanically the same, or that there’s a value-of-magazine-subscriptions equivalent to double opponent cells in the visual cortex, but I think the two processes are conceptually solutions to the same problem.
The general problem is trying to pick out salient features from what’s currently in the attention without being distracted by the macro-level problem of how what’s currently in the attention differs from everything else.
So in color vision, that’s something like determining what parts of a field are redder or greener than others without being distracted by the entire field being redder than usual because it’s sunset. In purchasing, it’s something like deciding which of two meals is better value than another without being distracted by the whole menu being more expensive than normal because it’s a fancy restaurant.
Yeah, that was my intuition (though I hadn’t thought about it enough to get that confident). I was just posing the question to see if anyone actually wanted to argue a connection between the two processes or if they were only using it as an analogy. I got the impression that Yvain was using it as an analogy but that Nick was arguing or assuming that both cases were actually using the same cognitive processes.
I really doubt that same neural mechanism is involved. Like P= 0.0005. We’re dealing with totally different areas of the brain that evolved hundreds of millions of years apart. I’m not even sure I see an obvious sense in which the optical illusion corresponds to the cognitive bias.
I don’t think it’s mechanically the same, or that there’s a value-of-magazine-subscriptions equivalent to double opponent cells in the visual cortex, but I think the two processes are conceptually solutions to the same problem.
The general problem is trying to pick out salient features from what’s currently in the attention without being distracted by the macro-level problem of how what’s currently in the attention differs from everything else.
So in color vision, that’s something like determining what parts of a field are redder or greener than others without being distracted by the entire field being redder than usual because it’s sunset. In purchasing, it’s something like deciding which of two meals is better value than another without being distracted by the whole menu being more expensive than normal because it’s a fancy restaurant.
Yeah, that was my intuition (though I hadn’t thought about it enough to get that confident). I was just posing the question to see if anyone actually wanted to argue a connection between the two processes or if they were only using it as an analogy. I got the impression that Yvain was using it as an analogy but that Nick was arguing or assuming that both cases were actually using the same cognitive processes.