The timing of responses to spatial perception-questions

Examination of the time of response to single problems in spatial perception suggests that the approach of subjects to multiple-choice questions may differ from their approach to free-choice questions. There is some evidence for thinking that the slower subjects score more highly, and that practice in a given type of problem affects speed rather than correctness of response. These results may provide a new interpretation of some effects previously observed in repeated retesting of the same group.

The design of the experiment discussed was a “balanced incomplete block”, in which 120 subjects were required to answer 108 out of the total of 540 problems.     

A factor related to the strength of an "Aha!" experience

Abstract: It is natural to assume that the strength of an "Aha!" becomes stronger when an unexpected solution is correct. In this study, this assumption is examined experimentally through a list of possible correct solutions. In the experiment, subjects listed the possible correct solutions before solving the problems, and evaluated the strength of their "Aha!" experience after they solved the problems. It was shown that the strength of the "Aha!" experience was strongest if the correct answer had not been included in the list of possible correct solutions; if included, the strength of the "Aha!" experience corresponded to the answer's position in the list, that is, the later the correct solution listed, the stronger the feeling became. It is suggested that the strength of an "Aha!" experience can be used as an error function in the learning process.     

Natural and contrived experience in a reasoning problem

This study is concerned with the effects of prior experience on a deceptive reasoning problem. In the first experiment the subjects (students) were presented with the problem after they had experienced its logical structure. This experience was, on the whole, ineffective in allowing subsequent insight to be gained into the problem. In the second experiment the problem was presented in “thematic” form to one group, and in abstract form to the other group. Ten out of 16 subjects solved it in the thematic group, as opposed to 2 out of 16 in the abstract group. Three hypotheses are proposed to account for this result.     

Response selection strategies and realism of confidence judgments

Two studies were conducted to examine how response selection strategy is related to confidence ratings and to performance on general knowledge questions. In both studies subjects were asked to answer 80 general knowledge questions and to rate their confidence in the correctness of the answer selected. A pilot study, in which subjects thought aloud while answering general knowledge questions, was carried out to identify different response selection strategies. In the first study, 40 subjects were asked to indicate which of four strategies (immediate recognition, inference, intuition, or guessing) they used for selecting an answer. In Study 2, think aloud reports from 20 subjects were coded into the same four strategies. The distribution of strategies differed between the studies, but there were very similar relations among strategy, confidence, and correctness of answer in the two studies. Response selection strategy was related to correctness of answer when confidence was partialed out. More specifically, immediate recognition was associated with higher proportion correct than with the other strategies. It was also found that ratings of how difficult the knowledge questions were to fellow students of the subjects were on a much more realistic level than the confidence ratings were. It is concluded that people could improve their confidence judgments by taking into account (a) how difficult a question is to other people, and (b) the response selection strategy used for answering the question.     

Certainty and Uncertainty: The Two Faces of the Hindsight Bias

“Hindsight Bias” is a person's tendency, after learning about the actual outcome of a situation or the correct answer to a question, to distort a previous judgment in the direction of this new information. In the literature, hindsight bias has been mostly discussed as an inevitable result of a “judgment under uncertainty.” We think that the hindsight bias is due to memorial as well as inferential processes: Whereas certainty about the recollection is memorial and concerns the recollective experience, certainty at the time of the judgment is inferential and concerns the individual's metaknowledge (“I know that I knew that”). In two experiments participants' feelings of certainty were measured indirectly (Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996) by giving participants the option of leaving those questions unanswered about which they felt uncertain. This free-report option was offered to half of the participants in the first estimate phase (concerning time of judgment) and to the second half in the memory phase (concerning the recollective experience). At the end of the session, participants were presented again with the questions they had skipped and were now required to answer them. This procedure allowed us to compare the amount of hindsight bias for the skipped, uncertain items to the spontaneously answered, certain ones. Both experiments demonstrated that the hindsight bias is a result of the interaction of both uncertainty and certainty.     

Memory for questions and amount of processing

Two experiments were carried out on how questions are remembered. Subjects watched a videotape of a series of simple events and then answered 18 questions about these events. The questions were all of the same general syntactic form (e.g., “Did the pencil fall against the jug on A?”, where A refers to a particular location). They were designed to elicit three sorts of answer: “yes,” “no” because the event took place at another location, and “no” because the event did not take place at all. After the subjects had answered the questions, they were given an unexpected test of their ability to recall them. A difference in the memorability of the questions was predicted on the basis of a procedural theory of comprehension and a hypothesis about memory subjects should cease to process a question when they realize that it concerns an event that did not take place, and such questions should be harder to remember because they are processed to a lesser degree than the other sorts of question. Experiment 1 confirmed the predictions, but its results in part could be accounted for by assuming that subjects recalled the original events and used them as a cue to remembering the questions. Experiment 2 eliminated this explanation by showing that when subjects do not have to answer certain questions, their recall of them is very poor. However, the same differences in the memorability of the three sorts of question were obtained for both answered and unanswered questions.     

Consistency in interpretation of probabilistic phrases

It is occasionally claimed in both applied decision analysis and in basic research that people can better use and understand probabilistic opinions expressed by nonnumerical phrases, such as “unlikely” or “probably,” than by numbers. It is important for practical and theoretical reasons to evaluate this claim. The available literature indicates that there is large variability in the mapping of phrases to numbers, but provides no indication as to its cause. This study asks (a) whether the variability can be attributed to how people interpret the phrases per se, rather than to how they use the number scale and (b) whether the variability is due primarily to between-subject or to within-subject factors. In order to answer these questions, 32 subjects ranked and compared 19 probability phrases on each of three occasions. The results show that individuals have a relatively stable rank ordering of the phrases over time, but that different individuals have different rank orderings. Practical and methodological implications of these data are discussed.     

Information selection and use in hypothesis testing: What is a good question,and what is a good answer?

The process of hypothesis testing entails both information selection (asking questions) and information use (drawing inferences from the answers to those questions). We demonstrate that although subjects may be sensitive to diagnosticity in choosing which questions to ask, they are insufficiently sensitive to the fact that different answers to the same question can have very different diagnosticities. This can lead subjects to overestimate or underestimate the information in the answers they receive. This phenomenon is demonstrated in two experiments using different kinds of inferences (category membership of individuals and composition of sampled populations). In combination with certain information-gathering tendencies, demonstrated in a third experiment, insensitivity to answer diagnosticity can contribute to a tendency toward preservation of the initial hypothesis. Results such as these illustrate the importance of viewing hypothesis-testing behavior as an interactive, multistage process that includes selecting questions, interpreting data, and drawing inferences.     

An experiment in psoblem solying

Trial-and-error problems are described in terms of “stimulus” difficulty, which is a measure of the number of possible modes of response left to the individual when all the information given is taken into account; and “phenomenal” difficulty, which is a measure derived from the individual's performance. An experiment is described in which three types of problem were presented to human subjects. In all three problems the stimulus difficulty was calculable, stage by stage, in the solution. The problems differed in this stimulus difficulty and also in the qualitative nature of the information provided—from unequivocal to conditional. It is shown that the qualitative difference of the nature of the information bears most relationship to phenomenal difficulty. Some observations are made on the modes of solution adopted, and further experimental work is suggested.     

The influence of an interpolated experience upon recognition

It was demonstrated in a previous experiment that an experience interpolated between an original experience and its recall may bring about changes in the points of emphasis in the recall of the original experience. Moreover, details of the interpolated experience may be recalled as if they had formed part of the original experience. These results were taken to mean that two experiences of a related kind may become merged in memory into something akin to Bartlett's notion of an organized mass of past experiences. In the experiment here reported, the original experience was the hearing of a story, and the interpolated experience the seeing of a picture which illustrated part of the story. When in a recognition test subjects were asked to select from three alternatives (including the original) the one version which was “most like the original story,” a proportion of them preferred to the original story a version which differed from the original by including a number of details from the picture. Asked about details, all the subjects tended to place details from the picture in the story, even if they had not been mentioned there. The results of the two experiments are thought to show that irreversible changes are brought about in the memory of an experience by subsequent experiences of a related kind.     

Suppressing natural heuristics by formal instruction: The case of the conjunction fallacy

A basic principle of probability is the conjunction rule, p(B) p(A&B). People violate this rule often, particularly when judgments of probability are based on intensional heuristics such as representativeness and availability. Though other probabilistic rules are obeyed with increasing frequency as people's levels of mathematical talent and training increase, the conjunction rule generally does not show such a correlation. We argue that this recalcitrance is not due to inescapable “natural assessments”; rather, it stems from the absence of generally useful problem-solving designs that bring extensional principles to bear on this class of problem. We predict that when helpful extensional strategies are made available, they should compete well with intensional heuristics. Two experiments were conducted, using as subjects adult women with little mathematical background. In Experiment 1, brief training on concepts of algebra of sets, with examples of their use in solving problems, reduced conjunction-rule violations substantially, compared with a control group. Evidence from similarity judgments suggested that use of the representativeness heuristic was reduced by the training. Experiment 2 confirmed these training effects and also tested the hypothesis that conjunction-rule violations are due to misunderstanding of “B” as “B and not A.” Changes in detailed wording of the propositions to be ranked produced substantial effects on judgment, but the pattern of these effects supported the hypothesis that, for the type of problem used here, most conjunction errors are due to use of representativeness or availability. We conclude that such intensional heuristics can be suppressed when alternative strategies are taught.     

The role of understanding in solving word problems

Word problems are notoriously difficult to solve. We suggest that much of the difficulty children experience with word problems can be attributed to difficulty in comprehending abstract or ambiguous language. We tested this hypothesis by (1) requiring children to recall problems either before or after solving them, (2) requiring them to generate final questions to incomplete word problems, and (3) modeling performance patterns using a computer simulation. Solution performance was found to be systematically related to recall and question generation performance. Correct solutions were associated with accurate recall of the problem structure and with appropriate question generation. Solution “errors” were found to be correct solutions to miscomprehended problems. Word problems that contained abstract or ambiguous language tended to be miscomprehended more often than those using simpler language, and there was a great deal of systematicity in the way these problems were miscomprehended. Solution error patterns were successfully simulated by manipulating a computer model's language comprehension strategies, as opposed to its knowledge of logical set relations.     

Specifying levels of processing

This study examines the nature of stimulus processing under semantic and nonsemantic orienting instructions. Two experiments are reported in which subjects were presented with a series of trials each beginning with the presentation of a “decision word” about which they made either a semantic or non-semantic orienting decision. This decision was followed by a word in coloured ink whose colour subjects were required to name as quickly as possible. On half the trails the coloured word was the primary associate of the decision word whilst on the other half the two words were normatively unrelated. On completion of the experiments the subjects were given an unexpected free recall test. The semantic orienting condition led to longer colour naming latencies on associate trials whilst no such difference was found in the non-semantic condition. The semantic condition also produced higher levels of incidental recall although paradoxically an analysis of associative clustering in recall failed to show any difference between the two orienting conditions. The results are interpreted as support for the “Levels of Processing” approach to memory since they provide an index of processing depth which is independent of retention performance.     

A preliminary study of distinctive features in problem solving

The abstract logical structure of family relationship problems, such as, “What relationship to a man is his mother's father?” was described in terms of a “distinctive-feature-transition count (dft)”, where the answer to the problem was characterized in terms of the distinctive features of descendancy, co-linearity, and sex. On average, it proved possible to predict the difficulty of such problems from such a count; thus tending to support the idea of a relational rather than an associative memory structure.     

Production,verification, and priming of multiplication facts

In the arithmetic-verification procedure, subjects are presented with a simple equation (e.g., 4 × 8 = 24) and must decide quickly whether it is true or false. The prevailing model of arithmetic verification holds that the presented answer (e.g., 24) has no direct effect on the speed and accuracy of retrieving an answer to the problem. It follows that models of the retrieval stage based on verification are also valid models of retrieval in the production task, in which subjects simply retrieve and state the answer to a given problem. Results of two experiments using singledigit multiplication problems challenge these assumptions. It is argued that the presented answer in verification functions as a priming stimulus and that on “true” verification trials the effects of priming are sufficient to distort estimates of problem difficulty and to mask important evidence about the nature of the retrieval process. It is also argued that the priming of false answers that have associative links to a presented problem induces interference that disrupts both speed and accuracy of retrieval. The results raise questions about the interpretation of verification data and offer support for a network-interference theory of the mental processes underlying simple multiplication.     

Judging Cumulative Risk1

The accuracy of young adults' perceptions of how cumulative risks to life, health, and property change over time was tested by asking subjects to judge the long-term probabilities associated with different periods of exposure to risks that are very small in the short term. Process analyses revealed evidence that strategy choice and associated accuracy depended on context and framing variables. Subjects asked to judge conjunctive probabilities adopted a variety of strategies, all of which failed to yield consistently accurate long-term probability judgments. However, subjects asked to judge disjunctive probabilities often reframed the probability questions into questions about the expected number of times the hazard would strike, which they could answer more accurately. Implications of the research for promoting public understanding of the long-term implications of cumulative risks are discussed.     

The role of sound intensity and stop-consonant voicing on McGurk fusions and combinations

The present paper argues that generalisation is conservative. Our goal was to experimentally study the links between knowledge generalisation and the storage of contextual elements. The knowledge domain, very simple chess configurations, allowed subjects, novices in chess, to acquire micro-expertise based on the analysis of a single source problem. In the first experimental phase, subjects had to analyse a source problem. We induced two modes of source-problem encoding: In the first group, subjects were given explanations focused on the sequence of elementary solving steps; in the other group they were given the general principle relevant to the category of problems in question. Subjects had then to solve different tests (solving isomorphic problems, recall tests, similarity tests) designed to answer two questions: The first question was to test whether the experimental manipulation in the two groups had in fact generated knowledge that varied in abstractness; the second question was to determine whether generalisation is accompanied by storage of surface features of the source problem. Results show that the knowledge generalisation is conservative. Subjects who generalise their knowledge have a better memory retention of context-dependent elements than the other subjects.     

Bats, balls, and substitution sensitivity: cognitive misers are no happy fools

Influential work on human thinking suggests that our judgment is often biased because we minimize cognitive effort and intuitively substitute hard questions by easier ones. A key question is whether or not people realize that they are doing this and notice their mistake. Here, we test this claim with one of the most publicized examples of the substitution bias, the bat-and-ball problem. We designed an isomorphic control version in which reasoners experience no intuitive pull to substitute. Results show that people are less confident in their substituted, erroneous bat-and-ball answer than in their answer on the control version that does not give rise to the substitution. Contrary to popular belief, this basic finding indicates that biased reasoners are not completely oblivious to the substitution and sense that their answer is questionable. This calls into question the characterization of the human reasoner as a happy fool who blindly answers erroneous questions without realizing it.     

Highs Are to Lows as Experts Are to Novices: Individual Differences in the Representation and Solution of Standardized Figural Analogies

Two experiments compared the strategies used by high and lower scorers on standardized figural analogy tests to represent and solve problems. In Experiment 1, subjects freely sorted completed analogy (A:a::B:b) problems into categories. High scorers categorized problems largely on the basis of well-constrained spatial transformations between problem terms; Low scorers sorted according to perceptual (i.e., shape) similarities among the figures constituting the problems. Experiment 2 compared the two groups' solution strategies in terms of specific patterns of eye movements used in viewing problem and answer terms. High scorers appeared to view problem terms in a more efficient fashion than did lower scorers. The lower scorers focused on noncritical figural relations (mapping figure A onto figure B), and they devoted more resources to processing the answer alternatives than did the high scorers. The pattern of results supports the view that high scorers tend to work in a more forward, or constructive, fashion, whereas lower scorers more often work backwards, using a response-elimination approach. Taken together, these findings converge to suggest specific aptitude-related differences in the representation and solution of standardized figural analogy problems. These differences bear some similarities to expert-novice differences in a number of other problem-solving domains.     

字谜与远距离联想解决中认知成分的比较

采用自发顿悟范式,通过事件相关电位(ERPs)探讨字谜和远距离联想（RAT）两类顿悟问题解决中的认知差异。结果发现,两类任务的正确反应时均在4000ms左右;解决两类任务的初期都在170ms时出现了正成分,且两类任务在此成分上没有显著差异;在600~700ms内,字谜比RAT诱发了一个更正的ERP成分,主要激活了中后部的脑区;在按键前的800~400ms内,字谜较RAT在右前额诱发了更正的脑电成分。结果表明,字谜顿悟和RAT顿悟存在相似的加工过程,但在重构阶段和啊哈体验上存在差异;两类任务在解决问题时重构过程的不同可能是造成情绪体验差异的原因