Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, United States.
Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Cognition. 2018 Oct;179:56-70. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.008. Epub 2018 Jun 15.
Trade-offs between advantageous but conflicting properties (e.g., speed vs. accuracy) are ubiquitous in cognition, but the relevant literature is conceptually fragmented, scattered across disciplines, and has not been organized in a coherent framework. This paper takes an initial step toward a general theory of cognitive trade-offs by examining four key properties of goal-directed systems: performance, efficiency, robustness, and flexibility. These properties define a number of basic functional trade-offs that can be used to map the abstract "design space" of natural and artificial cognitive systems. Basic functional trade-offs provide a shared vocabulary to describe a variety of specific trade-offs including speed vs. accuracy, generalist vs. specialist, exploration vs. exploitation, and many others. By linking specific features of cognitive functioning to general properties such as robustness and efficiency, it becomes possible to harness some powerful insights from systems engineering and systems biology to suggest useful generalizations, point to under-explored but potentially important trade-offs, and prompt novel hypotheses and connections between disparate areas of research.
在认知中，有利但相互冲突的属性（例如速度与准确性）之间的权衡是普遍存在的，但相关文献在概念上是分散的，分布在不同的学科中，并且没有以连贯的框架进行组织。本文通过检查目标导向系统的四个关键属性：性能、效率、鲁棒性和灵活性，朝着认知权衡的一般理论迈出了第一步。这些属性定义了许多基本的功能权衡，可以用来映射自然和人工认知系统的抽象“设计空间”。基本功能权衡提供了一个共同的词汇来描述各种特定的权衡，包括速度与准确性、通才与专家、探索与利用，以及许多其他权衡。通过将认知功能的具体特征与鲁棒性和效率等一般属性联系起来，就有可能利用系统工程和系统生物学的一些强大见解来提出有用的概括，指出尚未充分探索但可能很重要的权衡，并在不同的研究领域之间提出新的假设和联系。
