Anderson traces rational analysis's lineage to Brunswik and Gibson, then Marr and Shepard, before naming it his own

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Anderson opens his 1991 Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article on the 1990 rational-analysis program by placing it inside a pre-existing tradition rather than presenting it as an invention: "There has been a long tradition of trying to understand human cognition as an adaptation to its environment. The writings of Brunswik (1956) and Gibson (1966; 1979) represent classic examples of this approach. More recently, Marr (1982) and Shepard (1987) have provided rigorous developments of this perspective." Only after naming these four does he claim the program as his own: "I (Anderson 1990a) have tried to develop what I call 'rational analyses' of several broad categories of human cognition."

The ordering is load-bearing for how the vault has been reading Anderson's program. Egon Brunswik's probabilistic functionalism and James J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception are the oldest layer — mid-twentieth-century adaptationist accounts of perception, not cognition generally. Marr and Shepard sit one layer up as "more recent" figures who gave that older adaptationist intuition rigorous form — the same Marr whose computational level Anderson independently adopts by name elsewhere in this piece (claim-rational-analysis-anderson-optimal-solution-marr-level). Rational analysis, on Anderson's own account, is the newest layer on top of both: a methodology, not the origin of the idea that cognition is adapted to its environment.