Rational analysis is a theoretical framework, methodology, and research program in cognitive science that has been developed by John Anderson.
[1][2] The goal of rational analysis as a research program is to explain the function and purpose of cognitive processes and to discover the structure of the mind.
Chater and Oaksford contrast it with the mechanistic explanations of cognition offered by both computational models and neuroscience.
[4] Recent work in rational analysis often involves Bayesian cognitive science.
This framework has been recently extended by Falk Lieder and Thomas L. Griffiths that have proposed the so-called Resource-Rational Analysis (RRA), trying to incorporate additional constraints from those minimally hypothesized by the Rational analysis.