Heuristic

A useful mental shortcut or approximation, such as a rule-of-thumb, for guiding analysis and facilitating adaptive decision-making or thinking. Heuristics are intellectual tools, methods and procedures that favor scientific analysis and invention. A heuristic may be an educational technique to help students learn or discover new things, or to solve problems. In computer science, a heuristic is a problem-solving approach based on solving a simpler problem than the original more complex problem. Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick postulate “attribute substitution” as the heuristic process in which, without conscious awareness, a simpler question is substituted for a more complex one.