process can be modeled. A functional magnetic resonance imaging study tested whether the two processes, recognition and evaluation, can be separated on a neural basis. Participants were given two tasks; the first involved only a recognition judgment ("Have you ever heard of Modena? Milan?"), while the second involved an inference in which participants could rely on the recognition heuristic ("Which city has the larger population: Milan or Modena?"). For mere recognition judgments, activation in the precuneus, an area that is known from independent studies to respond to recognition confidence, was reported. In the inference task, precuneus activation was also observed, as predicted, and activation was detected in the anterior frontomedian cortex (aFMC), which has been linked in earlier studies to evaluative judgments and self-referential processing. The aFMC activation could represent the neural basis of this evaluation of ecological rationality. Some researchers have used event-related potentials (ERP) to test psychological mechanisms behind the recognition heuristic. Rosburg, Mecklinger, and Frings used a standard procedure with a city-size comparison task, similar to that used by Goldstein and Gigerenzer. They used ERP and analyzed familiarity-based recognition occurring 300-450 milliseconds after stimulus onset in order to predict the participants’ decisions. Familiarity-based recognition processes are relatively automatic and fast so these results provide evidence that simple heuristics like the recognition heuristic utilize basic cognitive processes. Controversies Research on the recognition heuristic has sparked a number of controversies. Trade-offs The recognition heuristic is a model that relies on recognition only. This leads to the testable prediction that people who rely on it will ignore strong, contradicting cues (i.e., do not make trade-offs; so-called noncompensatory inferences). In an experiment by Daniel M. Oppenheimer participants were presented with pairs of cities, which included actual cities and fictional cities. Although the recognition heuristic predicts that participants would judge the actual (recognizable) cities to be larger, participants judged the fictional (unrecognizable) cities to be larger, showing that more than recognition can play a role in such inferences. Newell & Fernandez performed two experiments to try to test the claims that the recognition heuristic is distinguished from availability and fluency through binary treatment of information and inconsequentiality of further knowledge. The results of their experiments did not support these claims. Newell & Fernandez and Richter & Späth tested the non-compensatory prediction of the recognition heuristic and stated that "recognition information is not used in an all-or-none fashion but is integrated with other