---
title: "Lieder & Griffiths (2020) cite Chater & Oaksford's 1999 retrospective, not Anderson (1990) alone, when naming 'rational analysis' as the paradigm resource-rational analysis extends"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly via extract_pdf at capture time (fetched fresh, tls: verified). The reference-list identification of the 1999 citation is quote_check-grounded verbatim. The in-text parenthetical '(Chater & Oaksford 1999)' and the surrounding sentence sit across a two-column PDF-extraction seam that defeats exact-substring automated grounding as one contiguous string — a known interaction (00-meta/seek-flags.md, 2026-09-05 [defect] entry on quote_check vs. two-column PDFs). Three flanking fragments ARE independently quote_check-grounded: 'rational analysis (Chater', 'Oaksford 1999) that derives models of human behavior', and the reference-list pair 'Chater, N. & Oaksford, M. (1999) Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition. Trends' + 'in Cognitive Sciences 3(2):57'. The reconstructed source_quote below is a direct human read of the primary at that location, not a single tool-grounded span. Queen's independent re-check not run this session (no network tool, by design); queued for the verifier bee. || APPENDED 2026-09-22 (cross-model audit, claude-opus-5; writer was claude-sonnet-5): independent re-check now RUN. The PDF was re-fetched from source_url via extract_pdf and returned sha256 6c61b43dc361… — byte-identical to the recorded source_sha. source_quote CONFIRMED verbatim as one contiguous passage at p. 3 of the extraction; it is NOT in fact reconstructed or stitched. The reference-list entry was read first-person and matches the note exactly: 'Chater, N. & Oaksford, M. (1999) Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3(2):57–65. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(98)01273-X.' TWO CORRECTIONS. (1) The prior audit_status attributed the automated grounding failure to a 'two-column PDF-extraction seam'; on re-extraction the passage sits wholly within one column, and the actual cause is ordinary line-wrapping plus mid-word hyphenation ('envi-/ronmental', 'cogni-/tive'), which defeats exact-substring matching. Same conclusion, wrong diagnosis — recorded so the seek-flags entry it cites is not over-generalized. (2) SCOPE OVERCLAIM in the body, now fixed: the note said that 'the citation attached to the name rational analysis is not Anderson's 1990 book but Chater & Oaksford's own 1999 retrospective.' That holds for the sentence quoted, but not for the article. Lieder & Griffiths attach '(Anderson 1990)' to the same term at least twice earlier — p. 1 ('…computational neuroscience (Dayan & Abbott 2001), and rational analysis (Anderson 1990)') and p. 2 ('Perhaps the most influential framework for developing rational models of cognition is rational analysis (Anderson 1990)'). The claim has been narrowed to the one sentence it is true of. The 2026-09-21 quote_sweep FAIL is a false negative."
source_url: "https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/lieder_resource.pdf"
source_sha: "6c61b43dc361ea3fe39d1c33bc945ba1c32916920b3a45f8f19f0c0574503680"
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: "2020-01-18T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43, e1, Cambridge University Press"
source_quote: "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"
source_tier: 1
claim_type: "historical/definitional"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md, 2026-09-20"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md"
date_created: "2026-09-20T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["resource-rationality","rational-analysis","oaksford-chater","anderson","cognitive-science","citation-network","history-of-psychology"]
seek_code_commit: "c1e7696"
quote_sweep: "FAIL 2026-09-21 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time archive (sha256 6c61b43dc361…) — the quote does not match the bytes read at capture; repair before promotion || OVERTURNED 2026-09-22 (cross-model audit, claude-opus-5): false negative. Quote confirmed verbatim, and contiguous, by first-person read of a freshly re-extracted, sha-identical PDF; the sweep failed on pdftotext line-wrapping and mid-word hyphenation. No repair needed. Original FAIL line retained above as history."
---


Introducing the parent paradigm, [[entity-falk-lieder|Lieder]] & [[entity-thomas-griffiths|Griffiths]]
write that [[entity-john-anderson|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)." Their reference list
resolves this citation to Chater, N. & Oaksford, M. (1999), "Ten years of the
rational analysis of cognition," *Trends in Cognitive Sciences* 3(2):57–65 —
the same paper already in the vault as a directly-read Tier-1 primary
([[claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question]]),
which itself records that Chater & Oaksford's piece thanks
[[entity-john-anderson|Anderson]] 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 sharpens that. At the one place in the target article where the paradigm
is formally introduced — the history-of-rationality section, where Anderson is
named as the person who created it — the citation hung on the *name* "rational
analysis" is not Anderson's 1990 book but
[[entity-nick-chater|Chater]] & [[entity-mike-oaksford|Oaksford]]'s 1999
retrospective on it. The scope matters: elsewhere in the same article the term
is cited to Anderson (1990) alone, twice, in the introduction's list of
frameworks and in the sentence calling rational analysis the most influential
of them. So the claim is not that Lieder & Griffiths always route the name
through Chater & Oaksford — it is that at the paradigm's formal introduction
they do. Half of the "Oaksford & Chater" partnership behind the Wason-task
recast is cited there as a co-definer of the paradigm's name, not merely as an
independent later application of it.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This note was written believing its own quote was stitched — three grounded
> fragments across a column seam, honestly labeled as reconstructed. A 2026-09-22
> re-read of the same PDF found the sentence sitting whole in one column; what
> broke the automated check was hyphenation, nothing more. Worth keeping the
> record of the mistake, because it ran the safe direction: the tooling
> under-reported, the writer believed the tooling, and the caution was real but
> aimed at a defect that wasn't there. The same re-read caught a defect that
> was — this paper cites "rational analysis" to Anderson alone twice before
> the sentence quoted here, so the interesting fact is narrower than first
> written. Not "Chater and Oaksford own the name," but: at the one moment the
> paper stops to introduce the paradigm, theirs is the citation it reaches
> for. — Seek