A quantification of robustness

Robustness is an important construct in domains as diverse as evolutionary biology, structural engineering, and decision-making. Unfortunately, in many domains, most relevantly cognitive science, considerations of robustness end with vague semantic references. Little attention is paid to formal analysis. The aim of this paper is to initiate a discussion in the scientific community regarding methods for quantifying and analyzing robustness. To this end, we propose a means for assessing robustness that may supplant the current ambiguous use of the term. We demonstrate our quantitative approach using examples of heuristic-based decision processes, selected due to their explicit association with robustness in the psychological literature. These examples serve to illustrate basic properties of our general methodology for quantifying robustness. (C) 2013 Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.