概率的不同表征对贝叶斯推理的影响的研究

该研究以贝叶斯推算、判断为实验任务,探讨了三种概率表征(百分比、自然频率、概率词)、三种概率规则认识水平对贝叶斯推理的影响,结果表明:1)概率词表征的贝叶斯推算实质是判断过程。2)在三种概率表征中,频率表征更适合于正确完成贝叶斯推理,但存在学科背景的差异。3)贝叶斯推理使用的策略有正确规则、错误规则、命题知识、概率简捷式、直觉和个人意愿六种。4)贝叶斯判断的正确率高于贝叶斯推算,个体在贝叶斯判断上使用的正确规则多于贝叶斯推算过程。     

The effect of emotion on statistical reasoning: Findings from a base rates task

In this paper we explore the effect of emotion on statistical reasoning. We employed a base rates task to examine reliance on statistical information in the presence of congruent or incongruent anecdotal information. The impact of emotional content on statistical reasoning was investigated in controls and victims of sexual abuse. Two types of emotional contents were used, one generally emotional, and one related to sexual abuse. The latter category was included to investigate the effect of semantically identical stimuli that could potentially produce different levels of emotion in the victim and control groups. For control participants, emotional contents were associated with decreased use of statistical information and increased use of anecdotal information compared to neutral contents. Results from the victims group showed this effect to be increased for contents related to sexual abuse, suggesting that the effect is linked to the emotional connotation rather than semantic content. Victims perceived contents relating to their experience as more emotional and this was associated with specific reasoning impairments for these topics.     

Two approaches to the formalisation of defeasible deontic reasoning

This paper compares two ways of formalising defeasible deontic reasoning, both based on the view that the issues of conflicting obligations and moral dilemmas should be dealt with from the perspective of nonmonotonic reasoning. The first way is developing a special nonmonotonic logic for deontic statements. This method turns out to have some limitations, for which reason another approach is recommended, viz. combining an already existing nonmonotonic logic with a deontic logic. As an example of this method the language of Reiter's default logic is extended to include modal expressions, after which the argumentation framework in default logic of [20, 22] is used to give a plausible logical analysis of moral dilemmas and prima facie obligations.An earlier version of this article was written while the author was working at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, supported by ESRC/MRC/SERC Joint Council Initiative Project G9212036. Work on the present version was supported by a research fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and by Esprit WG 8319 Modelage. I thank one of the referees for his interesting comments. Also, many thanks are due to Marek Sergot for valuable discussions on the topic of this paper.     

推理心理研究中的逻辑加工与非逻辑加工评析

本文对西方心理学研究中有关推理心理学争论的两个热点问题之一：逻辑推理与非逻辑推理之争的发展线索和相互关系等问题进行了评述,指出了这两种理论争论中未能注意到的三个问题,并对试图解决这三个问题的“知识和试题双重结构模型”作了简要介绍。     

Abstract reasoning and the interpretation of basic conditionals

Studies examining the interpretation that is given to if–then statementstypically use what are referred to as basic conditionals, which give contextless relations between two unrelated concrete terms (If the ball is blue, then the shape is square). However, there is some evidence that basic conditionals require a more abstract form of representation. In order to examine this, we presented participants with truth-table tasks involving either basic conditionals or conditionals referring to imaginary categories (If it is a bori, then it has red wings), and standard conditional inference tasks with abstract and familiar premises. As expected, fewer typical defective conditional interpretations were given to basic conditionals. In addition, partial correlations showed a unique relationship between the interpretation of basic conditionals and abstract inferential reasoning. Results suggest that people process basic conditionals as a form of abstract reasoning, and that the interpretation of conditionals must consider the semantic context.     

A child-centred exploration of the relevance of family and friends to theory of mind development

Theory of Mind (ToM) is said to develop at around 4 years old. But some studies suggest it develops considerably earlier than this, with others suggesting it develops much later. Although several recent studies have found that social factors (like gender, family size, number of siblings, and number of friends) can impact on ToM, other studies contradict those findings. We wondered whether addressing several procedural issues and ensuring the task concerns real protagonists in real time, would bear on the above issues. Here, 114 children of 3-6 years completed four ToM tasks incorporating controls from experimental psychology, including randomly varying the order of ToM and non-ToM questions across participants. Now, children passed ToM tasks from around 5 years old, rather than 4 years or earlier. Girls did not develop ToM any earlier than boys. There was clear correlational evidence for the older-sibling effect and effects of friends but no reliable effects of nuclear or extended family. However, when these factors were set in the context of one another, the sibling effect was driven by a negative influence from younger siblings (as opposed to older siblings) and the friends effect was driven by friends at school (as opposed to friends at home). Finally, "friends" was a stronger predictor than siblings but memory (a cognitive factor) and age (a maturational factor) were the strongest predictors of all.     

Measuring the ability of transitive reasoning,using product and strategy information

Cognitive theories disagree about the processes and the number of abilities involved in transitive reasoning. This led to controversies about the influence of task characteristics on individuals' performance and the development of transitive reasoning. In this study, a computer test was constructed containing 16 transitive reasoning tasks having different characteristics with respect to presentation form, task format, and task content. Both product and strategy information were analyzed to measure the performance of 6- to 13-year-old children. Three methods (MSP, DETECT, and Improved DIMTEST) were used to determine the number of abilities involved and to test the assumptions imposed on the data by item response models. Nonparametric IRT models were used to construct a scale for transitive reasoning. Multiple regression was used to determine the influence of task characteristics on the difficulty level of the tasks. It was concluded that: (1) the qualitatively distinct abilities predicted by Piaget's theory could not be distinguished by means of different dimensions in the data structure; (2) transitive reasoning could be described by one ability, and some task characteristics influenced the difficulty of a task; and (3) strategy information provided a stronger scale than product information.     

复合命题推理能力相关影响因素的实证研究

本研究由两个实验组成,探讨了影响9-11岁的儿童,少年和成年人的复合命题推理能力发展的相关因素,主要有格式类型、性别、材料性质等因素.结果表明:小同的格式类型、性别对被试的复合命题推理能力有着碌著的影响.而材料性质对被试的复合命题推理能力的影响体现在阶段性上,它只对儿童阶段的被试有影响,而对少年阶段和成年阶段的被试影响却不大.     

Ability and Knowing How in the Situation Calculus

Most agents can acquire information about their environments as they operate. A good plan for such an agent is one that not only achieves the goal, but is also executable, i.e., ensures that the agent has enough information at every step to know what to do next. In this paper, we present a formal account of what it means for an agent to know how to execute a plan and to be able to achieve a goal. Such a theory is a prerequisite for producing specifications of planners for agents that can acquire information at run time. It is also essential to account for cooperation among agents. Our account is more general than previous proposals, correctly handles programs containing loops, and incorporates a solution to the frame problem. It can also be used to prove programs containing sensing actions correct.     

Functional explanation and the function of explanation

Teleological explanations (TEs) account for the existence or properties of an entity in terms of a function: we have hearts because they pump blood, and telephones for communication. While many teleological explanations seem appropriate, others are clearly not warranted--for example, that rain exists for plants to grow. Five experiments explore the theoretical commitments that underlie teleological explanations. With the analysis of [Wright, L. (1976). Teleological Explanations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press] from philosophy as a point of departure, we examine in Experiment 1 whether teleological explanations are interpreted causally, and confirm that TEs are only accepted when the function invoked in the explanation played a causal role in bringing about what is being explained. However, we also find that playing a causal role is not sufficient for all participants to accept TEs. Experiment 2 shows that this is not because participants fail to appreciate the causal structure of the scenarios used as stimuli. In Experiments 3-5 we show that the additional requirement for TE acceptance is that the process by which the function played a causal role must be general in the sense of conforming to a predictable pattern. These findings motivate a proposal, Explanation for Export, which suggests that a psychological function of explanation is to highlight information likely to subserve future prediction and intervention. We relate our proposal to normative accounts of explanation from philosophy of science, as well as to claims from psychology and artificial intelligence.     

Incidental emotions have a greater impact on the logicality of less proficient reasoners

Previous research shows differences in reasoning about emotional and neutral stimuli. A common explanation hypothesised for this effect is that emotion incurs an additional cognitive load. If this is the case, incidental emotion should have a greater impact on the reasoning of less proficient reasoners, and when items are more difficult, because a greater proportion of available cognitive resources must be allocated to the task. We manipulated the emotional value of reasoning stimuli using conditioning and with the simultaneous presentation of images. The deleterious effect of emotion on logicality was greater for less proficient reasoners. There was also some indication that the effect of emotion may be more pronounced for more difficult items. Physiological responses and affective evaluations of the stimuli were similar across groups, irrespective of reasoning proficiency. Results provide some support for the hypothesis that the impact of emotion occurs through increased cognitive load.     

Enabling conditions and children’s understanding of pretense

Two experiments examined whether preschoolers’ difficulties on tasks that required relating pretending and knowledge (e.g., Lillard, A. S. (1993a). Young children’s conceptualization of pretense: Action or mental representational state? Child Development, 64, 372-386) were due to children’s inability to appreciate the causal mechanism behind enabling conditions. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were told about a character who knew about one kind of animal and did not know about another. The character acted in a manner consistent with both animals. Children were asked whether the character was pretending to be the animal of which he was ignorant. The character’s knowledge was either represented in a generic manner (as a picture) or in a manner that suggested a particular enabling condition relation that children found accessible (as a battery, which most 4-year-olds recognize is critical for making toys work). Children were more successful at relating knowledge and pretending in the battery condition. This improvement in performance extended to another task in which children had to identify the enabling condition relation between knowledge and identification, in which there were reduced demands on the inhibitory mechanisms necessary for success. Experiment 2 found that the results in Experiment 1 were not due to demands of the procedure used in Experiment 1. These results are discussed in the context of recent theories of theory of mind that focus on the importance of causal relations among mental states.     

条件推理的类比转换运用

该文通过2个实验研究旨在探究将演绎推理和类比推理结合在一起的四卡条件推理的类比转换运用的特点。结果表明：1）假设检验的条件推理过程在特定的实验条件下,表现出推理过程转换的心理加工特点;2）改善问题的陈述形式,使之和样例问题一样,能够降低推理过程转换的难度,促进推理过程转换的成绩;3）2个样例归纳的图式促进同形问题的解答,却对推理转换过程有抑制作用。     

One‐year‐old infants use teleological representations of actions productively

Two experiments investigated whether infants represent goal‐directed actions of others in a way that allows them to draw inferences to unobserved states of affairs (such as unseen goal states or occluded obstacles). We measured looking times to assess violation of infants' expectations upon perceiving either a change in the actions of computer‐animated figures or in the context of such actions. The first experiment tested whether infants would attribute a goal to an action that they had not seen completed. The second experiment tested whether infants would infer from an observed action the presence of an occluded object that functions as an obstacle. The looking time patterns of 12‐month‐olds indicated that they were able to make both types of inferences, while 9‐month‐olds failed in both tasks. These results demonstrate that, by the end of the first year of life, infants use the principle of rational action not only for the interpretation and prediction of goal‐directed actions, but also for making productive inferences about unseen aspects of their context. We discuss the underlying mechanisms that may be involved in the developmental change from 9 to 12 months of age in the ability to infer hypothetical (unseen) states of affairs in teleological action representations.     

Sweatshop labor is wrong unless the shoes are cute: Cognition can both help and hurt moral motivated reasoning

The present research investigated the dual role of cognition as either an enabler of moral reasoning or self-interested motivated reasoning for endorsing sweatshop labor. Experiment 1A showed motivated reasoning: participants were more likely to endorse the use of sweatshop labor when considering a Caribbean vacation with questionable labor practices for themselves than for their friends. Experiment 1B demonstrated that endorsement of sweatshop labor mediated the relationship between product desirability and purchase intention. Experiment 2 found that cognitive resources were recruited to enhance motivated reasoning regarding sweatshop labor, the latter of which was reduced under cognitive load. Experiments 3A and 3B found that when cognitive resources were specifically directed in a comparative joint evaluation, participants offered harsher views on the ethicality of a favored company, and were less influenced by motivated factors than when under separate evaluations.     

Optimal Predictions in Everyday Cognition: The Wisdom of Individuals or Crowds?

Griffiths and Tenenbaum (2006) asked individuals to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday events (e.g., cake baking times), and reported that predictions were optimal, employing Bayesian inference based on veridical prior distributions. Although the predictions conformed strikingly to statistics of the world, they reflect averages over many individuals. On the conjecture that the accuracy of the group response is chiefly a consequence of aggregating across individuals, we constructed simple, heuristic approximations to the Bayesian model premised on the hypothesis that individuals have access merely to a sample of k instances drawn from the relevant distribution. The accuracy of the group response reported by Griffiths and Tenenbaum could be accounted for by supposing that individuals each utilize only two instances. Moreover, the variability of the group data is more consistent with this small-sample hypothesis than with the hypothesis that people utilize veridical or nearly veridical representations of the underlying prior distributions. Our analyses lead to a qualitatively different view of how individuals reason from past experience than the view espoused by Griffiths and Tenenbaum.     

Chances and frequencies in probabilistic reasoning: rejoinder to Hoffrage,Gigerenzer, Krauss,and Martignon

Do individuals unfamiliar with probability and statistics need a specific type of data in order to draw correct inferences about uncertain events? Girotto and Gonzalez (Cognition 78 (2001) 247) showed that naive individuals solve frequency as well as probability problems, when they reason extensionally, in particular when probabilities are represented by numbers of chances. Hoffrage, Gigerenzer, Krauss, and Martignon (Cognition 84 (2002) 343) argued that numbers of chances are natural frequencies disguised as probabilities, though lacking the properties of true probabilities. They concluded that we failed to demonstrate that naive individuals can deal with true probabilities as opposed to natural frequencies. In this paper, we demonstrate that numbers of chances do represent probabilities, and that naive individuals do not confuse numbers of chances with frequencies. We conclude that there is no evidence for the claim that natural frequencies have a special cognitive status, and the evolutionary argument that the human mind is unable to deal with probabilities.