Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There is a great deal of discussion about whether people intuitively seek to falsify their working hypothesis. But therehas been little consideration of the relationships between falsificationist and probabilistic Optimal Experimental Design(OED) approaches to evaluating the usefulness of possible experiments. Recent work has shown that a variety of importantOED and heuristic models can be derived as special cases of the generalized Sharma-Mittal framework of information gainmeasures. We show how falsification-like behavior can also derive from a quasi-information gain model, based on high-degree Tsallis entropies. Our analysis shows that falsificationist and probabilistic approaches are not as far apart as theeast and the west. Rather, they can be built out of virtually the same set of ingredients, within a probabilistic framework.We report simulation studies showing how important falsificationist, OED, and hybrid models could be differentiated aspossible descriptive accounts of information-seeking behavior.