The road to Nobel prize is paved with the conceptualisations of rationality from homo economicus to homo heuristicus

In this paper we present the main psychological conceptions of rationality: unbounded rationality, bounded rationality, optimization under constraints, and ecological rationality. We show how these concepts directed the research questions, and how they shaped psychological models of complex cognitive processes. In its symbolic tradition, for more than a century, the psychology, as a fundamental cognitive science, has been focused on the question of how the environment is represented in the cognitive system, how the cognitive system operates with those information, and, ultimately, what are the outcomes of these processes. The basis on which the research efforts focusing on complex cognitive processes, such as judgment, decision-making, and reasoning - are rooted in is the stance of authors, and psychological models regarding rationality. The conceptualizations of rationality are, at the beginning of the psychological research, implicit, because they are taken from a normative approach, and the research focus is on the outcome of cognitive processes, while the functions and the processes themselves are neglected. Later, as the research diverge from the normative approach, the psychological conceptualization of rationality becomes more explicit and subjective, and more nested in the environment, and the empirical studies aim to describe the structure and dynamics of complex cognitive processes.