The Robustness of the Take The Best Configural Heuristic in Linearly and Nonlinearly Separable Environments

Take The Best (TTB) is a fast and frugal heuristic for paired comparison that has been proposed as a model of bounded rationality. This heuristic does not take compound cues into account to predict the criterion. However, causal knowledge about the relationship between a criterion and several cues may suggest that processing cues as configurations could be adaptive in a certain environment. In a series of simulations, we show that an extension of TTB, namely TTB-Configural, outperforms both the more frugal TTB and a more demanding benchmark. Moreover, we review empirical evidence that people process cues as configurations when equipped with the corresponding knowledge about the causal structure