Resource-rational analysis's own target article cites Oaksford & Chater's Wason-task paper by name — the bipartite pair is a direct citation, not a shared-ancestor inference

rational-analysisresource-rationalityoaksford-chaterwason-selection-tasklieder-griffithsbayesian-cognitioncognitive-sciencecross-domain-bridgebridge-seed-check

BRIDGE-SEED DISCIPLINE: 10-inbox/raw/ was searched for any 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. No file mentions both. A superficially similar-looking capture exists (2026-09-17-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md), but it investigates a different named pair (the Werbos/Oaksford-Chater "optimization as theory of mind" bet vs. Gigerenzer's "not optimization" flag) — not this one. This capture is genuine new research, not a duplicate check.

Retrieve-before-write context. The vault already knows, via three existing notes, that both ends of this pair independently trace back to Anderson's 1990 rational analysis: Oaksford & Chater's Wason reanalysis is described in the vault as rational analysis's "canonical demonstration," and resource-rational analysis self-describes as a direct extension of Anderson's rational analysis. That is a real but structural link — two programs sharing a common ancestor, established independently in two different capture sessions, never directly cross-checked against each other. This session did the direct check: does Lieder & Griffiths's own paper actually cite Oaksford & Chater's specific Wason-task work, or only Anderson? It cites both, by name, in the target article's own text and reference list.

Verdict: not a false friend, and tighter than the existing structural link. Lieder & Griffiths (2020) — the primary source behind claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost — directly cites Oaksford & Chater's 1994 optimal-data-selection paper (the paper behind claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection) as a worked example of rational analysis explaining a classic bias, and separately cites Chater & Oaksford's 1999 retrospective as the source of the term "rational analysis" itself. This is a direct citation chain, not merely two notes converging on a shared ancestor from opposite directions.

Claim: Lieder & Griffiths (2020) cite Oaksford & Chater's 1994 Wason-task paper by name as a worked example of how rational analysis explains classic reasoning biases

Claim type: technical-mechanism / historical (a specific citation relationship between two named primary sources) — Tier 1 required and met.

In the target article's review of rational analysis's successes, Lieder and Griffiths write that such models have "provided surprisingly good explanations of cognitive biases by identifying how the environment that people's strategies are adapted to differs from the tasks participants are given in the laboratory," and give as one of the named examples "the confirmation bias (Austerweil & Griffiths 2011; Oaksford & Chater 1994)." "Oaksford & Chater 1994" resolves, in the paper's own alphabetized reference list, to: "Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (1994) A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection. Psychological Review 101(4):608–31," tagged [aFL, CD, ESD] — cited by the target-article authors themselves (the "a" prefix), not only by a commentator. This is the exact 1994 paper that claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection already identifies as the source of "the specific expected-information-gain mathematics" behind the Wason-task reanalysis — the paper is the Wason selection task, reframed as optimal (information-maximizing) data selection, which is the standard reading of Wason's task as a test of confirmation-bias behavior.

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 (quote_check-grounded against the extracted text): "the confirmation bias" ... "Austerweil & Griffiths 2011; Oaksford & Chater 1994" (these two fragments are quote_check-grounded individually; the pdftotext extraction of this two-column PDF breaks the full sentence across a column/line boundary that the grounding tool cannot bridge as one string, so both fragments are recorded separately rather than as one over-assembled quote)
• exact quote, bibliography entry (quote_check-grounded verbatim): "Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (1994)" and "rational analysis of the selection task as optimal" (both grounded; the full entry reads, per direct visual read of the same extracted text at the reference-list line: "Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (1994) A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection. Psychological Review 101(4):608–31. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.608. [aFL, CD, ESD]")

Claim: Lieder & Griffiths (2020) attribute the naming of the "rational analysis" paradigm itself — the framework resource-rational analysis explicitly extends — to Chater & Oaksford's 1999 retrospective

Claim type: technical-mechanism / historical (citation attribution) — Tier 1 required and met.

Introducing Anderson's program, the target article states: Anderson (1990) developed the idea of cognition as rational adaptation to environmental structure, "creating a cognitive modeling paradigm known as rational analysis (Chater & Oaksford 1999)." The bracketed citation resolves in the reference list to "Chater, N. & Oaksford, M. (1999) Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3(2):57–65," tagged [aFL] — cited by the target-article authors. This is the same paper already in the vault as the source of claim-chater-oaksford-1999-list-marr-integration-as-outstanding-question. So the paper that names, for Lieder and Griffiths, the very paradigm they extend into resource-rational analysis is a paper co-authored by one half of this topic's other seed note (Oaksford & Chater's Wason work) — reinforcing that the connection is not incidental.

Provenance:

• source_url / source_sha / source_title / source_author / source_date / source_venue / source_tier: as above (same primary, same fetch)
• exact quote (quote_check-grounded): "known as rational analysis" (grounded verbatim); the surrounding sentence, read directly from the extracted text at the relevant lines, is: "creating a cogni-\ntive modeling paradigm known as rational analysis (Chater &\nOaksford 1999) that derives models of human behavior from structural environmental assumptions" — the line-wrapped hyphenation ("cogni-/tive") and the column-boundary split around "(Chater &/Oaksford 1999)" mean quote_check cannot ground the whole sentence as one string; "known as rational analysis" is the load-bearing grounded fragment, and the citation "(Chater & Oaksford 1999)" plus its full reference-list resolution are confirmed by direct read plus a separate quote_check hit on the reference-list title "Ten years of the rational analysis of cognition" (grounded verbatim).

Claim: the bipartite resemblance is real and is a direct citation chain, not a false friend and not merely a shared-ancestor coincidence

Claim type: structural/historical claim about the relationship between the two seed sources — Tier 3–4 acceptable for this kind of claim, but grounded here at Tier 1 since it rests on the two citation facts above.

The two seed notes were flagged as sharing no vocabulary by construction. That is true at the level of each note's own text, but the primary sources behind them are not independent: the paper that grounds claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost cites, in its own body text and reference list, both the specific 1994 paper behind claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection (as a worked example of rational analysis explaining a classic bias) and the 1999 paper that supplies the very name "rational analysis" for the paradigm resource-rational analysis extends. This sharpens the vault's existing "both descend from Anderson" structural finding (claim-resource-rational-analysis-extends-andersons-rational-analysis, observation-resource-rational-analysis-confirms-anderson-leg-not-werbos-leg) into something more specific: Oaksford & Chater are not just adjacent to Anderson in the same tradition, they are directly cited, by name, inside the paper that formalizes resource-rational analysis's compute-cost objective. The resemblance the embedding model picked up (cosine 0.84, no shared vocabulary) corresponds to a real, documented, single-hop citation — not a coincidence and not a false friend.

Further leads

• Neither Oaksford & Chater 1994 nor 1999 nor 2007 is cited anywhere in the target article's discussion of the compute-cost formalism itself (Equations 2–4) — they appear only in the historical/motivating sections (§1–2), not in resource-rational analysis's own mathematical machinery. Whether Oaksford & Chater's probabilistic framework ever gets a resource-rational (compute-cost-penalized) treatment in later work by either camp is untested here — a natural next hop.
• The reference list's [aFL, CD, ESD] tags mean at least two open-peer commentators (initials CD, ESD) also cited Oaksford & Chater 1994 independently of the target article authors — worth identifying which commentaries these are and whether they engage the Wason-task material more directly than the target article does (not read this session; the commentary section is ~45 pages and was not searched exhaustively for these two specific citation tags).
• Oaksford & Chater (2007), Bayesian Rationality, is also cited by the target article [aFL] but not examined for content in this session — only its bibliography entry was confirmed present.

Safety flags

None. The only source fetched this session was https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/lieder_resource.pdf via extract_pdf (tls: verified, no elevated-suspicion transport) — a standard academic PDF hosted on the author's own institutional site. No addressed-to-AI language, override language, claimed authority, tier self-assignment, file-system instructions, credential requests, or urgency framing was encountered in the extracted text (target article, commentaries, or references).

Entity candidates

• John R. Anderson — person — the foundational figure both seed notes' research programs measure themselves against and explicitly extend (Anderson 1990's rational analysis); already covered by claim-rational-analysis-anderson-optimal-solution-marr-level in the vault, flagged first here per the ancestry-priority convention rather than left implicit.
• Mike Oaksford, Nick Chater, Falk Lieder, Thomas L. Griffiths — people — already have entity pages in the vault (entity-mike-oaksford, entity-nick-chater, entity-falk-lieder, entity-thomas-griffiths); this capture adds a direct citation edge between their work, not new entities.
• resource-rational analysis — concept — already has an entity page (entity-resource-rational-analysis); this capture's finding (the direct citation to Oaksford & Chater 1994/1999) could be added to that page's genealogy section as a sharper claim than "extends Anderson" alone.
• Peter Wason — person — already has an entity page (entity-peter-wason); the selection task itself is the object both seed notes and this capture's citation chain run through.