Economic cognition in humans and animals: the search for core mechanisms

Over the past few decades, research in judgment and decision-making has revealed that decision-makers, though not always rational, are often quite predictable. Here, we attempt to explore the nature of this systematicity with a different approach to decision-making. Specifically, we propose that some of the systematicity of human decision-making may result from the operation of core knowledge mechanisms, domain-specific learning mechanisms with characteristic processing limitations. In this review, we describe the core knowledge approach and argue that at least some aspects of human decision-making have the signature characteristics of a core knowledge system, namely, such strategies develop early in ontogeny and are shared with closely related primate relatives.