Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the history of cognitive science, there have been two com-peting philosophies regarding how people reason about theworld. In one, people rely on rich, generative models to makepredictions about a wide range of scenarios; while in the other,people have a large “bag of tricks”, idiosyncratic heuristics thattend to work well in practice. In this paper, we suggest thatrather than being in opposition to one another, these two ideascomplement each other. We argue that people’s capacity formental simulation may support their ability to learn new cue-based heuristics, and demonstrate this phenomenon in two ex-periments. However, our results also indicate that participantsare far less likely to learn a heuristic when there is no logical orexplicitly conveyed relationship between the cue and the rele-vant outcome. Furthermore, simulation—while a potentiallyuseful tool—is no substitute for real world experience