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What are some of the drawbacks to probabilistic models of cognition? Ask Question

Probabilistic approaches to modelling cognition are increasing in popularity and being encouraged
within the field (Chater, Tanenbaum, & Yuille, 2006).
26 What are some of the arguments against or drawbacks (other than scalability/intractability) to using
this approach?

computational-modeling cognitive-modeling bayesian

16
edited Oct 13 '12 at 11:17 asked Mar 15 '12 at 5:09
Chuck Sherrington Vielle
5,539 4 34 78 1,250 13 22

3 This isn't really a proper answer, but you may find informative the following BBS paper criticizing Bayesian
models of cognition: Jones M., Love B. (2011). Bayesian fundamentalism or enlightenment? On the explanatory
status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition. Behav. Brain Sci. 34, 169–188. –
Jake Westfall Mar 16 '12 at 6:55

3 Bowers, J. S., & Davis, C. J. (2012). Bayesian just-so stories in psychology and neuroscience. Psychological
Bulletin, 138(3): 389–414. and a commentary on it: Griffiths, T.L., Chater, N., Norris, D., & Pouget, A. (2012).
How the Bayesians Got Their Beliefs (and What Those Beliefs Actually Are): Comment on Bowers and Davis.
Psychological Bulletin, 138(3): 415-422. – ouyang May 1 '12 at 15:12

3 Answers

Probabilistic approaches of this sort are usually referred to more specifically as the bayesian
approach and Chater and Tanenbaum are definitely bayesians (I have not read much by Yuille and
22 can't comment). Bayesianism is more than just increasing in popularity and being encouraged; it is
considered one of the big-4 approaches to cognitive-modeling, with the other 3 being: connectionism,
rule-based, and dynamic systems. The bayesian approach has many positives and produced many
great results, but since your question is about the drawbacks I will focus exclusively on that. Two
major drawbacks are: neural grounding and rationality.

Neural grounding is a weakness that plagues all of the big-4 and cognitive science in general. The
idea is that as we build models of the mind, we want to eventually ground them in the brain; this is a
standard feature of reductionism. The bayesian approach is often summarized as "probabilities over
rules", and suffers from the same difficulty of neural grounding as the rule-based approach did. It is
often not clear how the brain implements this sophisticated bayesian inference (but the field is well
aware of this problem, and works hard to resolve it). Is this a game killer? Not really, connectionism is
often considered the more 'biologically-plausible' alternative, but most popular connectionist models
can be just as easily questioned on their biological viability. The issue can also be sidestepped
completely by saying that we do wish to address cognition at a different level that biological
implementation (sort of how thermodynamics can have laws without the specific grounding provided
by statistical mechanics). An example of this on our site is looking for behaviorist interpretations of
models (note that decision field theory falls more into the dynamic systems approach, so it isn't a
Home
perfect example).
Questions
For me, the much more prominent weakness is rationality. Bayes rule is inherently rational --
Tags humans are not; a bayesian has to use various hacks to account for human irrationality.
Connectionism does not suffer from this drawback, and neither do some exotic approaches like
Users
Busemeyer's quantum cognition (I provide a sketch in this answer). If you want to see why models
Unanswered based on classical probability have a difficulty explaining aspects of human irrationality, take a look at
Busemeyer, J. R., Wang, Z., & Townsend, J. T. (2006).

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:56 answered Mar 15 '12 at 6:00

Community ♦ Artem Kaznatcheev
1 9,256 5 59 150

Artem gave a very good answer, but I want to add one more weaknesses of probabilistic/Bayesian
models: they are not mechanistic. This is related to Artem's point about neural grounding, but is a little
13 different. The issue is that probabilistic models don't really provide insight into the underlying
mechanism that produces the observed behavior -- if you ask the question "why does it work?", the
Bayesian model's answer is "because cognition is Bayesian" and that's it. Models that allow structure
(and behavior) to emerge from interactions of lower-level elements provide more insight into cognitive
mechanisms (though not necessarily neural mechanisms). I think (at least some) connectionist and
dynamic systems models try to do this. To read more about this, check out:

McClelland, J. L., Botvinick, M. M., Noelle, D. C., Plaut, D. C., Rogers, T.T., Seidenberg, M. S., and
Smith, L. B. (2010). Letting Structure Emerge: Connectionist and Dynamical Systems Approaches to
Understanding Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 348-356.

answered Mar 15 '12 at 18:10

Dan M.
1,684 10 13

4 Griffiths et al in the same issue is a good counterpart to this article:

psychology.adelaide.edu.au/personalpages/staff/amyperfors/… – Jeff Mar 15 '12 at 20:14

4 This is a good point! Although I suspect a bayesian would respond that it is not clear how connectionists or
dynamic explanations are more mechanistic, since they tend to hide things in poorly understood 'emergence'. –
Artem Kaznatcheev Mar 17 '12 at 14:31

1 I have had similar sentiments, one of the reasons why I asked my question. – Vielle Apr 29 '12 at 3:50

This should perhaps be a comment, but I don't have the reputation. The other two answers mention
that a major drawback to the Bayesian approach is its lack of biological plausibility. However, see for
10 instance:

Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes

Ma, W.J. and Beck, J.M. and Latham, P.E. and Pouget, A.

Nature Neuroscience, 2006

The authors propose a method by which populations of neurons may actually represent probability
distributions. I don't know how convincing I find the construction, but it may be worth looking into if
you're curious about the subject.

It may also be worth mentioning that while neuroscientists do seem to use the word "Bayesian" to
refer generically to probabilistic approaches to reasoning, "Bayesian statistics" or "Bayesian
probability" is a bit more than Bayes' rule. By itself, Bayes' rule is just a mathematical identity in
probability theory.

edited Apr 3 '12 at 18:53 answered Apr 3 '12 at 3:01

Catharsis yep
488 2 6 324 2 7

1 I agree that this is more a comment than an answer, but it could be closer to an answer on this question. Also,
your last paragraph is incredibly true, and I wish more researchers were conscious of this :D. –
Artem Kaznatcheev Apr 3 '12 at 19:14

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