Declarative Memory

ABSTRACT— Neuroimaging of declarative memory is not an endeavor divorced from psychology but, instead, is another path through which a more complete understanding of memory has emerged. Specifically, neuroimaging allows us to determine if differences between memory states emerge from quantitatively or qualitatively distinct underlying encoding operations. Further, it has allowed for greater specification of the putative control operations adopted when we make decisions about our memories. We describe some examples of insights provided by neuroimaging into the many and varied processes that support encoding and retrieval of declarative memory.     

Medical decision-making and minors: issues of consent and assent

The physician-patient relationship has been described as an egalitarian partnership in which patients and physicians work together to make healthcare decisions. Although adults receive considerable encouragement to become active participants in medical decision-making, children and adolescents often have little voice in such decisions and are granted limited access to confidential medical care. After a brief discussion of legal perspectives on informed consent, the present review examines the developmental literature on children and adolescents' capacities to make medical decisions that are informed, voluntary, and rational. The purposes and benefits of assent are identified. Remaining questions of how to evaluate capacity and balance parental and minor autonomy are explored.     

Effects of decision-making on reactions to an evaluational stressor

The present study tested the hypothesis that an opportunity to make decisions enhances perceived control. This hypothesis predicts that decision-making will reduce the adverse effects of stress. Subjects worked on an intellectual task and their stress reactions were assessed using subjective and behavioral measures. Decision-making improved the highly anxious subjects' persistence with the task. This finding supports the hypothesis. However, less anxious subjects persisted less after being allowed to make decisions. Several explanations positing possible cognitive and motivational processes of the less anxious subjects are offered.     

Cultural and Religious Variation in Attitudes to Young People Consenting to Health Interventions

There is a limited amount of empirical data available regarding the cultural and religious variation in perceptions about the age when young people should be regarded as competent to make decisions in health settings. A public survey of 400 adults from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds was conducted in the UK and Spain. Attitudes were assessed using case vignettes. It was found that high religious practice was associated with recommending a higher age of consent for medical interventions. White British adults were more likely than Spanish adults to agree that younger adolescents should be allowed to consent to medical interventions. The study suggests that there is social, cultural and religious variation in adults’ attitudes regarding the age when youngsters should consent to health interventions.

     

自我—他人危机决策信息加工过程的差异:来自眼动的证据

本研究采用iView X-RED眼动仪,分两个实验来考察自我-他人危机决策的信息加工过程的差异。实验一采用单因素实验设计探讨自我-他人危机决策的信息加工过程,结果表明：为自我决策组的平均阅读时间、平均注视时间、平均注视次数、平均凝视时间、平均回视次数都显著高于为他人决策组。实验二采用2（任务框架：积极,消极）x2（决策者角色：为自我、为他人）混合实验设计,结果表明：在积极框架下,为自我决策组平均阅读时间、平均注视时间、平均注视次数、平均凝视时间、平均回视次数显著高于为他人决策组;在消极框架下,两个组没有显著差异。总体表现为,自我-他人危机决策的信息加工过程存在差异,且受任务框架的影响。     

The Social Nature of Engineering and its Implications for Risk Taking

Making decisions with an, often significant, element of risk seems to be an integral part of many of the projects of the diverse profession of engineering. Whether it be decisions about the design of products, manufacturing processes, public works, or developing technological solutions to environmental, social and global problems, risk taking seems inherent to the profession. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the topic and specifically to how our understanding of engineering as a distinctive profession might affect how we should make decisions under risk. This paper seeks to remedy this, firstly by offering a nuanced account of risk and then by considering how specific claims about our understanding of engineering as a social profession, with corresponding social values and obligations, should inform how we make decisions about risk in this context.     

How readers experience characters’ decisions

When people read narratives, they have ample opportunities to encode mental preferences about characters’ decisions. In our present project, we examined how readers’ preferences for characters’ decisions structure their experiences of story outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants read brief stories and explicitly rated which of two potential decisions they thought the characters should make. The actual decision that each character made was either preferred or nonpreferred by readers. By the end of each story, readers learned whether there was a positive or negative outcome to these decisions. Decisions and outcomes either matched (e.g., a preferred decision followed by a positive outcome) or did not match (e.g., a nonpreferred decision followed by a negative outcome). Participants took longer to read outcome sentences when there was a mismatch. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding with a task that allowed more natural reading. These results provide converging evidence that readers encode responses to characters’ decisions and that these responses affect the time course with which they assimilate story outcomes.     

Appropriateness of decisions as a moderator of the psychology of voice

This paper focuses on the psychology of the voice effect (the effect that people show more positive reactions when they are allowed an opportunity to voice their opinion in the decision‐making process than when they are denied such an opportunity). It is argued that it is important to ask about what decisions people are allowed voice. More specifically, results of two experiments suggest that when participation in decision making is appropriate (i.e. voice is allowed about decisions that are relatively important to participants) the voice effect is found: People's procedural judgements and other reactions are more positive following voice as opposed to no‐voice procedures. However, when participation in decision making is inappropriate (i.e. voice is allowed about decisions that are unimportant to participants) no effect or even a reversal of the voice effect is found. These people do not react differently or even react more negatively following voice as opposed to no‐voice procedures. It is concluded that these results further our insights into the psychology of procedural justice in general and voice in particular. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The promise and perils of self-regulated study

Self-regulated study involves many decisions, some of which people make confidently and easily (if not always optimally) and others of which are involved and difficult. Good study decisions rest on accurate monitoring of ongoing learning, a realistic mental model of how learning happens, and appropriate use of study strategies. We review our research on the decisions people make, for better or worse, when deciding what to study, how long to study, and how to study.     

Pervasiveness of framing effects among physicians and medical students

Researchers have been documenting the influence of framing upon decision making for more than two decades; decisions appear to change in response to superficial changes in the presentation of possible outcomes. Several studies of medical decision making have revealed; for instance, that clinical decisions differ when options are presented as gains (survival rates) rather than losses (mortality rates). However, most studies of framing effects in the medical domain have utilized a very limited number of clinical problems that have not allowed an adequate test of the prevalence of the phenomena. To extend previous studies, we presented three groups of subjects (experienced internists, residents, and third-year medical students) with booklets containing twelve hypothetical medical cases. Half of the subjects received gain versions and half received loss versions of the same cases. Chi-square analyses revealed that framing did not influence any of the decisions of medical students and influenced the decisions of residents and experienced physicians on only two of the clinical problems (the same two problems). It appears that the prevalence of framing effects in the clinical domain may be limited.     

Prevalence-based decisions undermine visual search

In visual search, observers make decisions about the presence or absence of a target based on their perception of a target during search. The present study investigated whether decisions can be based on observers’ expectation rather than perception of a target. In Experiment 1, participants were allowed to make target-present responses by clicking on the target or, if the target was not perceived, a target-present button. Participants used the target-present button option more frequently in difficult search trials and when target prevalence was high. Experiment 2 and 3 employed a difficult search task that encouraged the use of prevalence-based decisions. Target presence was reported faster when target prevalence was high, indicating that decisions were, in part, cognitive, and not strictly perceptual. A similar pattern of responses were made even when no targets appeared in the search (Experiment 3). The implication of these prevalence-based decisions for visual search models is discussed.     

Four empirical tests of Unconscious Thought Theory

According to Unconscious Thought Theory, people make better decisions after unconscious than after conscious thought (Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & van Baaren, 2006a). Unconscious Thought Theory yields four specific predictions. First, an exact replication of Dijksterhuis et al. (2006a) study should indicate that unconscious decisions are superior to conscious decisions. Second, decisions should improve with duration of conscious thought. Third, unconscious decisions should be superior to conscious decisions, even if unconscious decisions are deliberated while having access to information. Fourth, unconscious decisions should be based on a weighting strategy. We report results of four studies, featuring 480 participants, that yield no evidence in favor of these predictions. Therefore our findings cast doubt on Unconscious Thought Theory and its advice to base decisions on unconscious thought. The results of our studies suggest that it is better to base decisions on conscious thought while having access to information.     

Towards a Cognitive Theory of Cyber Deception

This work is an initial step toward developing a cognitive theory of cyber deception. While widely studied, the psychology of deception has largely focused on physical cues of deception. Given that present-day communication among humans is largely electronic, we focus on the cyber domain where physical cues are unavailable and for which there is less psychological research. To improve cyber defense, researchers have used signaling theory to extended algorithms developed for the optimal allocation of limited defense resources by using deceptive signals to trick the human mind. However, the algorithms are designed to protect against adversaries that make perfectly rational decisions. In behavioral experiments using an abstract cybersecurity game (i.e., Insider Attack Game), we examined human decision-making when paired against the defense algorithm. We developed an instance-based learning (IBL) model of an attacker using the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture to investigate how humans make decisions under deception in cyber-attack scenarios. Our results show that the defense algorithm is more effective at reducing the probability of attack and protecting assets when using deceptive signaling, compared to no signaling, but is less effective than predicted against a perfectly rational adversary. Also, the IBL model replicates human attack decisions accurately. The IBL model shows how human decisions arise from experience, and how memory retrieval dynamics can give rise to cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias. The implications of these findings are discussed in the perspective of informing theories of deception and designing more effective signaling schemes that consider human bounded rationality.     

Animal welfare and individual characteristics: a conversation against speciesism

It seems impossible for a human being not to have some point of view concerning nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) welfare. Many people make decisions about how humans are permitted to treat animals using speciesist criteria, basing their decisions on an individual's species membership rather than on that animal's individual characteristics. Although speciesism provides a convenient way for making difficult decisions about who should be used in different types of research, we argue that such decisions should rely on an analysis of individual characteristics and should not be based merely on species membership. We do not argue that the concept of species is never useful or important. To make our points, we present a conversation among a skeptic, an agnostic, and a proponent of the view that our moral obligations to an animal must be based on an analysis of that individual's characteristics. In the course of the discussion, concepts such as personhood, consciousness, cognitive ability, harm, and pain are presented, because one's understanding of these concepts informs his or her ethical decisions about the use of animals by humans.     

Legal and psychological perspectives on children’s competence to testify in court

Young children are often called as witnesses to crimes they were victims of or observed. Because of their immaturity, child witnesses are sometimes more heavily scrutinized than adult witnesses before being allowed to testify in court, for example, through competency screening. This review discusses the psychology and US law relevant to decisions about children’s testimonial competency. Legally, a child is competent to provide in-court testimony if the presiding judge finds that the child can understand and answer basic interview questions, observe and recall pertinent events, understand the difference between truths and lies, and be affected by the moral obligation to tell the truth on the stand. We review the legal foundation and current practice of testimonial competence standards and discuss issues in the current system. We then review developmental psychology literature on children’s capabilities and individual differences in each domain of testimonial competency as well as the limited body of literature on competency exams. Finally, we make empirically-based recommendations and conclusions and highlight the need for further research and policy reforms related to children’s testimonial abilities.     

A Biased Inferential Naivety learning model for a network of agents

We propose a Biased Inferential Naivety social learning model. In this model, a group of agents tries to determine the true state of the world and make the best possible decisions. The agents have limited computational abilities. They receive noisy private signals about the true state and observe the history of their neighbors' decisions. The proposed model is rooted in the Bayesian method but avoids the complexity of fully Bayesian inference. In our model, the role of knowledge obtained from social observations is separated from the knowledge obtained from private observations. Therefore, the Bayesian inferences on social observations are approximated using inferential naivety assumption, while purely Bayesian inferences are made on private observations. The reduction of herd behavior is another innovation of the proposed model. This advantage is achieved by reducing the effect of social observations on agents' beliefs over time. Therefore, all the agents learn the truth, and the correct consensus is achieved effectively. In this model, using two cognitive biases, there is heterogeneity in agents' behaviors. Therefore, the growth of beliefs and the learning speed can be improved in different situations. Several Monte Carlo simulations confirm the features of the proposed model. The conditions under which the proposed model leads to asymptotic learning are proved.     

Who emerges as a leader? Meta-analyses of individual differences as predictors of leadership emergence

For more than sixty years, the leaderless group discussion (LGD) has been commonly used to assess leadership emergence and potential. This research focuses on individual differences as predictors of leader emergence in LGDs. Meta-analytic methods allowed us to combine and compare results from 45 studies, producing 196 effect sizes, and make statistically guided decisions about the strength of relationships between individual difference and personality variables and leadership emergence in LGDs. Consistent with more general research on leader emergence and effectiveness, we found a number of individual differences predictive of leader emergence in LGDs, most notably extraversion and authoritarian personality. This research augments previous meta-analytic research on personality and leadership with a focus specifically on the leaderless group discussion.     

Ethics Consultation and Autonomy

Services of ethics consultants are nowadays commonly used in such various spheres of life as engineering, public administration, business, law, health care, journalism, and scientific research. It has however been maintained that use of ethics consultants is incompatible with personal autonomy; in moral matters individuals should be allowed to make their own decisions. The problem this criticism refers to can be conceived of as a conflict between the professional autonomy of ethics experts and the autonomy of the persons they serve. This paper addresses this conflict and maintains that when the nature of both ethics consultation and individual autonomy is properly understood, the professional autonomy of ethics experts is compatible with the autonomy of the persons they assist.