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  • Chapter 20 - An Introduction to Psychologically Plausible Sampling Schemes for Approximating Bayesian Inference

  • from Part VI - Computational Approaches
  • Edited by Klaus Fiedler, Universität Heidelberg, Peter Juslin, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden, Jerker Denrell, University of Warwick
  • Book:
    Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making
    Published online:
    01 June 2023
    Print publication:
    15 June 2023, pp 467-489

  • Summary

    The brain must make inferences about, and decisions concerning, a highly complex and unpredictable world, based on sparse evidence. An “ideal” normative approach to such challenges is often modeled in terms of Bayesian probabilistic inference. But for real-world problems of perception, motor control, categorization, language understanding, or commonsense reasoning, exact probabilistic calculations are computationally intractable. Instead, we suggest that the brain solves these hard probability problems approximately, by considering one, or a few, samples from the relevant distributions. Here we provide a gentle introduction to the various sampling algorithms that have been considered as the approximation used by the brain. We broadly summarize these algorithms according to their level of knowledge and their assumptions regarding the target distribution, noting their strengths and weaknesses, their previous applications to behavioural phenomena, as well as their psychological plausibility.