Connecting behavioural biologists and psychologists: Clarifying distinctions and suggestions for further work

This article is a reply to the commentaries on our target article, which relates our group's work on simple heuristics to biological research on rules of thumb. Several commentators contrasted both these approaches with behaviour analysis, in which the patterns of behaviour investigated in the laboratory are claimed to be near-universal attributes, rather than specific to particular appropriate environments. We question this universality. For instance, learning phenomena such Pavlovian or operant conditioning have mostly been studied only in a few generalist species that learn easily; in many natural situations the environment hinders learning as an adaptive strategy. Other supposedly general phenomena such as impulsiveness and matching are outcome models, which several different models of simple cognitive processes might explain. We clarify some confusions about optimisation, optima and optimality modelling. Lastly, we say a little more about how heuristics might be selected, learnt and tuned to suit the current environment.