Insects have small brains and heuristics or 'rules of thumb' are proposed here to be a good model for how insects optimize the objects they make and use. Generally, heuristics are thought to increase the speed of decision making by reducing the computational resources needed for making decisions. By corollary, heuristic decisions are also deemed to impose a compromise in decision accuracy. Using examples from object optimization behavior in insects, we will argue that heuristics do not inevitably imply a lower computational burden or lower decision accuracy. We also show that heuristic optimization may be driven by certain features of the optimization problem itself: the properties of the object being optimized, the biology of the insect, and the properties of the function being optimized. We also delineate the structural conditions under which heuristic optimization may achieve accuracy equivalent to or better than more fine-grained and onerous optimization methods.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 14. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 27 April 2020.
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#2,823,340
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Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#5,611
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#53,573
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Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#155
of 697 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,592,204 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 89th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 35,530 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.9. This one has done well, scoring higher than 84% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 345,089 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 84% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 697 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 77% of its contemporaries.
