Resource-rational analysis (Lieder & Griffiths 2020) self-describes as a direct extension of Anderson's rational analysis, pushing it toward Marr's algorithmic level

In their Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article, Falk Lieder and Thomas L. Griffiths state their project's genealogy in their own words: "Resource-rational analysis can be seen as an extension of rational-analysis from predicting behavior from the structure of the external environment to predicting cognitive mechanisms from internal cognitive resources and the external environment." The relationship is not incidental framing — it is built out structurally. Anderson's rational analysis (claim-rational-analysis-anderson-optimal-solution-marr-level, Anderson 1990, The Adaptive Character of Thought) is given as a six-step method (Box 1: specify goals, model the environment, assume minimal computational limits, derive optimal behavior, test against data, iterate). Resource-rational analysis is presented as a parallel five-step method (Box 2) that keeps Anderson's computational-level starting point but adds three things Anderson's program deliberately omitted: an explicit class of feasible algorithms, the resource costs those algorithms incur, and a derivation of the algorithm that optimally trades resource cost against approximation accuracy.

The authors describe the move as "pushing the principles of rational analysis toward Marr's algorithmic level" — the same computational/algorithmic distinction already load-bearing in the vault's Anderson note. Where classical rational analysis assumes an essentially unbounded optimizer and reads behaviour off the environment's structure alone, resource-rational analysis makes the optimizer's own limits part of what is being optimized.

This confirms one of the two legs the vault's optimization-as-theory-of-mind bridge was probing: the Anderson side of that bridge holds, explicitly and quotably. The Werbos side does not (claim-resource-rational-analysis-descends-from-bounded-optimality-not-werbos-adp), and the combined verdict is worked out in observation-resource-rational-analysis-confirms-anderson-leg-not-werbos-leg.