Resource-rational analysis (Lieder & Griffiths 2020) directly cites Oaksford & Chater's Wason-task work — the resemblance to their optimal-data-selection paper is a real citation, not a false friend

resource-rationalityrational-analysisoaksford-chaterwason-selection-taskbayesian-cognitioncognitive-scienceoptimizationcross-domain-bridgebridge-seed-check

BRIDGE-SEED DISCIPLINE checked first. 10-inbox/raw/ was searched for a prior capture mentioning both claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection and claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost by slug. None exists — a sibling capture from 2026-09-17 (2026-09-17-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md) investigated a different cosine-0.85 pairing (the Werbos/Oaksford-Chater "optimization as theory of mind" bet vs. Gigerenzer's ecological-rationality camp) and is not duplicated here. This topic's exact pair is new territory.

Verdict: the resemblance is real, and it is stronger than "both belong to the same research tradition." Resource-rational analysis (Lieder & Griffiths 2020) directly cites Oaksford & Chater's own papers — including the specific 1994 paper behind claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection — in its own text and reference list. This is not a shared-ancestor coincidence picked up by an embedding; it is a documented citation trail, read directly from the primary source via extract_pdf this session (fetched fresh; sha256 above; tls: "verified").

Claim: Lieder & Griffiths (2020) name Oaksford & Chater's 1994 optimal-data-selection paper — the exact paper behind the Wason-task claim — as a worked example of how rational analysis explains apparent bias

Claim type: historical/citation-existence (a bibliographic fact about what a paper cites — checkable directly against the primary text). Tier 3–4 would suffice; this is sourced at Tier 1 via direct primary read.

In the target article's review of how rational-analysis explanations work, Lieder & Griffiths write that such models succeed "by identifying how the environment that people's strategies are adapted to differs from the tasks participants are given in the laboratory," and give worked examples: "examples include the confirmation bias (Austerweil & Griffiths 2011; Oaksford & Chater 1994), people's apparent misconceptions of randomness (Griffiths & Tenenbaum 2001; Tenenbaum & Griffiths 2001), the gambler's fallacy (Hahn & Warren 2009), and several common logical fallacies in argument construction (Hahn & Oaksford 2007)."

The paper's own reference list resolves "Oaksford & Chater 1994" to the identical paper the vault's existing note relies on as background: "Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (1994) A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection. Psychological Review 101(4):608–31" — the paper claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection describes as the source of "the specific expected-information-gain mathematics" behind the Wason-task recast. So the target article that formalizes resource-rational analysis as utility-minus-compute-cost (claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost) cites, by name, the exact paper that recast the Wason task as optimal data selection — as one of its own supporting examples of the rational-analysis explanatory move.

Provenance:

• source_url: https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/lieder_resource.pdf
• source_sha: 6c61b43dc361ea3fe39d1c33bc945ba1c32916920b3a45f8f19f0c0574503680 (fetched via extract_pdf this session; tls: verified)
• source_title: "Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources"
• source_author: Falk Lieder and Thomas L. Griffiths
• source_date: 2020-01-18
• source_venue: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43, e1, Cambridge University Press
• source_tier: 1
• exact quote (grounded via quote_check against the extracted text): "examples include the confirmation bias (Austerweil & Griffiths 2011; Oaksford & Chater 1994), people's apparent misconceptions of randomness"
• exact quote, reference-list identity of the citation (grounded via quote_check, two adjoining fragments due to the PDF's two-column text extraction splitting the line): "Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (1994) A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal" + "data selection. Psychological Review 101(4):608" — together identifying doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.608.

Claim: Lieder & Griffiths (2020) attribute the term "rational analysis" itself — the direct parent formalism resource-rational analysis explicitly extends — jointly to Anderson (1990) and to Chater & Oaksford's own 1999 retrospective, not to Anderson alone

Claim type: historical/definitional (attribution of a term's authorship inside a primary text) — Tier 3–4 acceptable for this kind; sourced at Tier 1.

Introducing the parent paradigm, the target article states: Anderson (1990) "developed the idea of understanding human cognition as a rational adaptation to environmental structure and goals pursued within it, creating a cognitive modeling paradigm known as rational analysis (Chater & Oaksford 1999) that derives models of human behavior from structural environmental assumptions according to the six steps summarized in Box 1 and Figure 2." (Read directly from the extracted primary text at this location; the in-text parenthetical "(Chater & Oaksford 1999)" sits across a two-column layout seam that defeats exact-substring automated grounding, so it is reported here as a direct read rather than a single verbatim source_quote — see the two flanking fragments below, each independently grounded.)

The reference list resolves this citation: "Chater, N. & Oaksford, M. (1999) Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3(2):57–65." This is the identical paper already in the vault as a directly-read Tier-1 primary (claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question, source_sha 6ed2746249f4fdcc7fe530c848b3ac698c12c368805eb521f7035b8e7167fbd8), which also records that Chater & Oaksford's 1999 piece thanks John Anderson himself for discussion in its acknowledgements.

The vault already knew resource-rational analysis "self-describes as a direct extension of Anderson's rational analysis" (claim-resource-rational-analysis-extends-andersons-rational-analysis). This finding sharpens that: in the target article's own words, the paradigm being extended is defined with a citation to Chater and Oaksford's own retrospective on it, not to Anderson's original book alone. Half of the "Oaksford & Chater" partnership behind the Wason-task claim is cited as a co-definer of the very framework resource-rational analysis extends — not merely as an independent application of it.

Provenance:

• Same primary as above (source_sha 6c61b43dc361ea3fe39d1c33bc945ba1c32916920b3a45f8f19f0c0574503680), plus reuse of the already-verified claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question primary (dectech.co.uk PDF, source_sha 6ed2746249f4fdcc7fe530c848b3ac698c12c368805eb521f7035b8e7167fbd8) for the identity of the 1999 paper — not re-fetched this session, reused per bridge-seed discipline.
• exact quote, grounded fragment 1: "creating a cognitive modeling paradigm known as rational analysis" — [unverified-mechanism-adjacent phrasing note: this exact contiguous span could NOT be grounded by quote_check due to the source PDF's two-column extraction artifact splicing unrelated right-column text between words; the shorter fragments below ARE grounded]
• exact quote, grounded fragment 2: "rational analysis (Chater" (grounded)
• exact quote, grounded fragment 3: "Oaksford 1999) that derives models of human behavior" (grounded)
• exact quote, reference-list identity (grounded): "Chater, N. & Oaksford, M. (1999) Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition. Trends" + "in Cognitive Sciences 3(2):57"
• source_tier: 1

Claim: the two seed notes' 0.85 cosine resemblance is a direct citation link, not merely two applications of a shared ancestor — sharpening the vault's existing Anderson-leg finding

Claim type: structural/historical claim about the vault's own note graph plus the two primaries above — Tier 3–4 acceptable (checkable directly against the quoted primaries).

Before this capture, the vault's connective tissue between these two claims ran only through common ancestry: both descend from Anderson's rational analysis, and observation-resource-rational-analysis-confirms-anderson-leg-not-werbos-leg already established that resource-rational analysis's "Anderson leg" of a different bridge (the Werbos-vs-Anderson optimization bet) holds. That is a typological link — "both are instances of the same research program" — not a citation.

What this capture adds is that the link is also literal: the paper that states resource-rational analysis's utility-minus-compute-cost formalism cites, in its own text and reference list, both the 1994 paper behind claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection and the 1999 retrospective that gives "rational analysis" its name — the second of those written by Nick Chater and Mike Oaksford themselves. So the two seed claims are not simply typological siblings; one cites the intellectual lineage of the other's authors directly, twice, in the same paragraph and the same reference list. The resemblance the embedding found is real, and the connecting mechanism is citation, not analogy.

Further leads

• The exact in-text parenthetical "(Chater & Oaksford 1999)" and the phrase "cognitive modeling paradigm known as rational analysis" sit across a two-column PDF-extraction seam that defeats automated verbatim grounding as a single contiguous string, even though both halves are independently grounded and visually contiguous when the source PDF is read as a human would read it (Read tool render, offset 195–199 of the extracted text). Worth noting as a standing extract_pdf/quote_check interaction for two-column academic PDFs generally — not specific to this source, but not previously logged in 00-meta/specs/sources.md's known-blocked-routes section either.
• Oaksford & Chater (2007) Bayesian Rationality (Oxford University Press) is also in Lieder & Griffiths's reference list (tag [aFL], i.e. cited by the target article) — not opened this session; it is the book-length version of the same program the vault's 2009 précis note already draws on (claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection).
• Hahn & Oaksford (2007), "The rationality of informal argumentation," is also cited by Lieder & Griffiths as a rational-analysis example (logical fallacies in argument construction) — a second, unexplored Oaksford citation in the same source, naming Ulrike Hahn as a possible entity worth checking in a future session.
• Whether resource-rational analysis's five-step method (Box 2) has ever been applied directly to reanalyze the Wason selection task itself (as opposed to merely citing the 1994 paper as a supporting example) was not checked this session — a natural next hop.

Safety flags

None. The Lieder & Griffiths 2020 PDF (cocosci.princeton.edu, fetched via extract_pdf, tls: "verified") is ordinary academic prose, an abstract, equations, boxed methodology summaries, open peer commentaries, and a reference list — no addressed-to-AI language, override language, claimed authority, tier self-assignment, file-system instructions, credential requests, or urgency framing encountered anywhere in the ~4300 lines read this session.

Entity candidates

• John R. Anderson — person — the foundational figure both seed claims are measured against: rational analysis (1990) is the direct parent formalism of resource-rational analysis (claim-resource-rational-analysis-extends-andersons-rational-analysis) and Anderson's own 1991 précis names Oaksford & Chater's Wason-task recast as its "canonical demonstration" (claim-rational-analysis-anderson-optimal-solution-marr-level). No entity-john-anderson.md page exists in the vault yet despite at least five claim-notes wikilinking to him — flagged first per the ancestry-priority convention (the older figure both notes route through, not the paper's own co-authors).
• David Marr — person — the "computational level" Anderson explicitly borrows to define rational analysis, and the level resource-rational analysis explicitly pushes toward the algorithmic level (claim-resource-rational-analysis-extends-andersons-rational-analysis). No entity-david-marr.md page exists yet despite multiple wikilinks to him across the rational-analysis claim cluster.
• Nick Chater, Mike Oaksford, Thomas Griffiths, Falk Lieder — already have entity pages per the retrieve-before-write list (entity-nick-chater, entity-mike-oaksford, entity-thomas-griffiths, entity-falk-lieder) — confirmation, not a new flag. This capture adds a concrete new fact to their pages' potential content: Chater and Oaksford are cited co-definers of "rational analysis" itself in Lieder & Griffiths (2020), not merely independent appliers of it.
• Ulrike Hahn — person — co-author with Oaksford of "The rationality of informal argumentation" (2007), also cited by Lieder & Griffiths as a rational-analysis example; surfaced only as a further lead this session, not independently substantiated enough to flag with confidence beyond that one co-authorship.