Bayesian decision-making rules our unconscious

Cory Doctorow 6:39 am Wed Jan 21, 2004

Bayesian statistical modelling is a tool used to compare new events to past experience, something useful for applications as diverse as predicting whether a message is spam and whether a Web-page is relevant to a given subject. New research indicates that we do a lot of Bayesian comparisons in our heads, particularily when engaged in athletic tasks:

"Most decisions in our lives are done in the presence of uncertainty," Dr. Körding said. "In all these cases, the prior knowledge we have can be very helpful. If the brain works in the Bayesian way, it would optimally use the prior knowledge."

The researchers drew the analogy to tennis in their paper, and it is not the first study to suggest that athletes have a more sophisticated understanding of mathematics than even they may realize.

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(via K5)

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