Contingency assessment is a major module of adaptive cognition and a prominent topic of ecological rationality. Virtually all influential theories assume that contingency estimates between Y and X are inferred from subjective conditional probabilities of focal Y levels given different X levels, p ( Y focal | X different levels ) . Yet, conditional probabilities are cognitively demanding, as Yfocal must be assessed separately for all levels of Xdifferent level. Pseudocontingencies (PCs) afford …