Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-world coping skills are based, instead, on a procedural memory system, currently under intense behavioral neuroscientific investigation, that is surprisingly overlooked in Kahneman's book. , Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman's recently published, best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, [1] adopts a dual process explanation of human cognition. For purposes of exposition he accepts the previously published designations System 1 and System 2 for these two processes.[2] According to him, the fast System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. The core of System 1, he adds, is an associative ability that operates on the declarative memory of facts and recallable personal experiences. He includes in System 1 the experience-based fast execution of coping skills. The slow System 2 is meditative. It allocates attention to effortful mental activities such as reasoning and complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. The book, and therefore this article, ignores the many and diverse cognitive details of System 2. The bulk of Kahneman's heuristics and biases (H and B) claims are based on the highly revealing, and justly celebrated, experiments that he conducted with Amos Tversky, together with the wealth of work that these experiments spawned. However, these experiments almost ubiquitously involve situations in which the subject has had little or no opportunity for experiential learning. Having thought slowly about his digression into the domain of experientially-learned skillful coping, we have concluded that this is at best incomplete. The coping skills that Kahneman explicitly mentions include firefighting decision making, the choice of good moves by a chess master playing rapidly, driving decisions on an open road, and reading and understanding nuances of social situations. These skills are indeed executed rapidly, automatically, and with little or no effort, but are they produced by the associative System 1? 2 Kahneman's account of skill Kahneman seems to assume that declarative memory can indeed explain learned skillful coping. He undertakes on page 11 an explanation of fast chess play. …