Recognition-primed decision

Okay kiddo, imagine you're playing a game where you have to make quick decisions. Let's say you're playing a game of tag with your friends and you see one of your friends running towards you. You have to make a decision quickly - are you going to run away or stay and try to tag them?

When you make decisions like this quickly, you don't always think through all of your options. Instead, your brain kind of takes a shortcut. It remembers similar situations you've been in before and uses those experiences to help you make a decision.

This is kind of like a firefighter who has to make quick decisions in an emergency. They don't have time to stop and think about what to do, so they rely on their training and past experiences to guide them.

This way of making quick decisions is called recognition-primed decision making. It's like your brain has a little library of past experiences and it uses those experiences to guide you in the present.

So, when you saw your friend running towards you, your brain recognized the situation as similar to past experiences you've had playing tag. It used that recognition to prime your decision - you decided to run away because you know that's a good strategy for avoiding being tagged.

In short, recognition-primed decision making is when your brain uses past experiences to guide quick decision making. It's like a library of experiences in your brain that helps you make the best decisions in the present moment.