Core capacities of the mind like reasoning and decision making are exercised as responses to specific information-processing tasks. It is often assumed that these responses are strategic, taking into account resource limitations and trade-offs between the costs and quality of information-processing mechanisms. Yet, when the input information is missing, search must become part of the mind’s strategic response. This symposium features two tasks, inductive inferences and decisions under uncertainty, to highlight the strategic nature of information search (sampling). Marlene Hecht shows that if people consult their social network to make uncertain inferences, their search through the network is best described as sequential, limited, and less impactful for online contacts. Kevin Tiede presents work indicating that people increase their sampling effort to alleviate informational imbalances between described and experienced choice options. Linus Hof and Mikhail Spektor expand the symposium’s view on decisions from experience, demonstrating, for example, how sampling and integration strategies can interact to produce distinct choice patterns and psychoeconomic profiles. Doron Cohen concludes by presenting a simplified drift diffusion model. He uses the model to reconsider basic assumptions of sequential sampling approaches, which treat
information search as an evidence accumulation process. As a whole, the collection of talks suggests that our explanations of cognitive capacities and the phenomena they produce can be improved by postulating how these capacities implement a strategic information search.