Attribute weighting methods and decision quality in the presence of response error: a simulation study

This paper uses a simulation approach to investigate how different attribute weighting techniques affect the quality of decisions based on multiattribute value models. The weighting methods considered include equal weighting of all attributes, two methods for using judgments about the rank ordering of weights, and a method for using judgments about the ratios of weights. The question addressed is: How well does each method perform when based on judgments of attribute weights that are unbiased but subject to random error? To address this question, we employ simulation methods. The simulation results indicate that ratio weights were either better than rank order weights (when error in the ratio weights was small or moderate) or tied with them (when error was large). Both ratio weights and rank order weights were substantially superior to the equal weights method in all cases studied. Our findings suggest that it will usually be worth the extra time and effort required to assess ratio weights. In cases where the extra time or effort required is too great, rank order weights will usually give a good approximation to the true weights. Comparisons of the two rank-order weighting methods favored the rank-order-centroid method over the rank-sum method. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reliability and dimensionality of judgments of visually textured materials

We extended perceptual studies of the Brodatz set of textured materials. In the experiments, texture perception for different texture sets, viewing distances, or lighting intensities was examined. Subjects compared one pair of textures at a time. The main task was to rapidly rate all of the texture pairs on a number scale for their overall dissimilarities first and then for their dissimilarities according to six specified attributes (e.g., texture contrast). The implied dimensionality of perceptual texture space was usually at least four, rather than three. All six attributes proved to be useful predictors of overall dissimilarity, especially coarseness and regularity. The novel attribute texture lightness, an assessment of mean surface reflectance, was important when viewing conditions were wide-ranging. We were impressed by the general validity of texture judgments across subject, texture set, and comfortable viewing distances or lighting intensities. The attributes are nonorthogonal directions in four-dimensional perceptual space and are probably not narrow linear axes. In a supplementary experiment, we studied a completely different task: identifying textures from a distance. The dimensionality for this more refined task is similar to that for rating judgments, so our findings may have general application.     

Cues and Components in Multiattribute Evaluation

Multiattribute additive evaluation models largely ignore the causal structure connecting attributes and overall evaluations. We propose here a distinction between two such causal structures. In "cue-type" tasks, attributes reflect or indicate the value of a distal variable measuring all or part of the entity′s worth. In "component-type" tasks, attributes are themselves the constitutive elements of worth. Attributes of the two kinds should be combined differently. Results are reported from two experiments in which the verbal context was manipulated so as to induce either cue-type or component-type interpretations of identical attribute sets. The data strongly suggest that subjects are sensitive to the distinction and respond in theoretically appropriate ways.     

Multidimensional scaling of individual differences for an individual person with a hand-held calculator

An extension to the INDSCAL method of individual differences scaling was developed. The method derives measures of deviation from a “standard” observer, who is defined in terms of the INDSCAL subject weights. These weights are calculated for one individual person at a time. The method is implemented in a small hand-held calculator. The calculator is used for data acquisition, and it interacts with the user in a conversational manner through an alpha-numeric display. The present implementation of the method scales 84 judgments of pair similarity among seven objects and derives subject weights on two dimensions. The method can be extended to sets of up to 16 objects and up to six dimensions. The method is a feasible, cost-effective approach to classification of individuals on complex perceptual attributes within a single 1-h session.     

Both perceptual and conceptual factors influence taste-odor and taste-taste interactions

Observers are often asked to make intensity judgments for a sensory attribute of a stimulus that is embedded in a background of “irrelevant” stimulusdimensions. Under some circumstances, these background dimensions of the stimulus can influence intensity judgments for the target attribute. For example, judgments of sweetness can be influenced by the other taste or-odor qualities of a solution (Frank & Byram, 1988; Kamen et al., 1961). Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the influence of stimulus context, instructional set, and reference stimuli on cross-quality interactions in mixtures of chemosensory stimuli. Experiment 1 demonstrated that odor-induced changes in sweetness judgments were dramatically influenced when subjects rated multiple attributes of the stimulus as compared with when they judged sweetness alone. Several odorants enhanced sweetness when sweetness alone was judged, while sweetness was suppressed for these same stimuli when total-intensity ratings were broken down into ratings for the sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness, and fruitiness of each solution. Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar pattern of results when bitterness was the target taste. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that the instructional effects applied to both taste-odorand taste-taste mixtures. It was concluded that the taste enhancement and suppression observed for taste-odor and taste-taste mixtures are influenced by (1) instructional sets which influence subjects’ concepts of attribute categories, and (2) the perceptual similarities among the quality dimensions of the stimulus.     

Trade-off between memory for verbal items and their visual attributes.

Instructions to attend to the case and color in which words were presented led to improved retention of these visual attributes but depressed recognition performance. This trade-off between item and attribute memory occurred at three presentation rates (1.5, 5.5, and 10.5 sec/item), suggesting that visual attributes of verbal stimuli are rarely stored unless subjects expect that knowledge of physical form will be useful later. Visual attributes of high-imagery words were retained better than visual attributes of low imagery words by subjects instructed to attend to case and color, but not by subjects asked only to attend to word meaning. Implications of these findings for the hypothesis that visually presented verbal stimuli are stored as literal copies are discussed.     

Vision,knowledge, and assertion

I report two experiments studying the relationship among explicit judgments about what people see, know, and should assert. When an object of interest was surrounded by visibly similar items, it diminished people’s willingness to judge that an agent sees, knows, and should tell others that it is present. This supports the claim, made by many philosophers, that inhabiting a misleading environment intuitively decreases our willingness to attribute perception and knowledge. However, contrary to stronger claims made by some philosophers, inhabiting a misleading environment does not lead to the opposite pattern whereby people deny perception and knowledge. Causal modeling suggests a specific psychological model of how explicit judgments about perception, knowledge, and assertability are made: knowledge attributions cause perception attributions, which in turn cause assertability attributions. These findings advance understanding of how these three important judgments are made, provide new evidence that knowledge is the norm of assertion, and highlight some important subtleties in folk epistemology.     

Associative false consumer memory: effects of need for cognition and encoding task

Two experiments investigated the effects of product–attribute associations on false consumer memory. In both experiments, subjects were presented with sets of related product attributes under incidental encoding conditions. Later, recognition memory was tested with studied attributes, non-studied but associated attributes (critical lures) and non-studied unrelated attributes. In Experiment 1, the effect of Need for Cognition (NFC) was assessed. It was found that individuals high in NFC recognised more presented attributes and falsely recognised more associative critical lures. The increase in both true and associative false memory was accompanied by a greater number of responses that index the retrieval of detailed episodic-like information. Experiment 2, replicated the main findings through an experimental manipulation of the encoding task that required subjects to consider purchase likelihood. Explanations for these findings are considered from the perspective of activation processes and knowledge structures in the form of gist-based representations.     

Intertemporal Similarity: Discounting as a Last Resort

Standard models of intertemporal choice assume that individuals discount future payoffs by integrating reward amounts and time delays to generate a discounted value. Alternative models propose that, rather than integrate across them, individuals compare within attributes (amounts and delays) to determine if differences in one attribute outweigh differences in another attribute. For instance, the similarity model 1) compares the two reward amounts to determine whether they are similar, 2) compares the similarity of the two time delays, and then 3) makes a decision based on these similarity judgments. Here, I tested discounting models against attribute‐based models that use similarity judgments to make choices. I collected intertemporal choices and similarity judgments for the reward amounts and time delays from participants in three experiments. All experiments tested the ability of discounting and similarity models to predict intertemporal choices. Model generalization analyses showed that the best predicting models started with similarity judgments and then, if similarity failed to make a prediction, resorted to discounting models. Similarity judgments also matched intertemporal choice data demonstrating both the magnitude and sign effects, thereby accounting for behavioral data that contradict many discounting models. These results highlight the possibility that attribute‐based models such as the similarity models provide alternatives to discounting that may offer insights into the process of making intertemporal choices. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Notes on the weighting biases in value trees

The variation in the structure of value trees can have undesirable effects on the attribute weights. Earlier experiments suggest that an attribute receives a higher weight if it is presented at an upper level in a value tree or if it is split into subattributes. Here we show that it is flawed to make conclusions about the biases at the individual level based on the averages of weights across large groups of subjects. Averages do not describe individual behavior. Furthermore, the averages of weights tend to approach even weights. By using the data from earlier experiments we illustrate how the averaging can produce different phenomena. We also show that the use of weights based on the rank order of attributes only can easily lead to biases when the structure of a value tree is changed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Verbal Counting Moderates Perceptual Biases Found in Children's Cardinality Judgments

A crucial component of numerical understanding is one's ability to abstract numerical properties regardless of varying perceptual attributes. Evidence from numerical match-to-sample tasks suggests that children find it difficult to match sets based on number in the face of varying perceptual attributes, yet it is unclear whether these findings are indicative of incomplete numerical abstraction abilities early in development or instead are driven by specific demands of the matching task. In this study, we explored whether perceptual biases would be found in data from a numerical task invoking verbal representations of number and whether these biases are moderated by verbal counting behavior. Three- to 6-year-old children classified as proficient counters (cardinal principle knowers) participated in a number cardinality task in which they were asked to identify which of 2 arrays—either perceptually homogeneous or heterogeneous in appearance—contained a specific number of animals (e.g., “12 animals”). Results revealed an overall performance bias for homogeneous trials in this cardinality task, such that children were better able to exactly identify the target cardinality when items within the sets were perceptually identical. Further analyses revealed that these biases were found only for those children who did not explicitly verbally count during the task. In contrast, performance was unaffected by the perceptual attributes of the array when the child spontaneously counted. Together, results reveal that cardinality judgments are negatively impacted by perceptual variation, but this relationship is muted in those children who engage in verbal counting.     

Motivational influences on impression formation: outcome dependency, accuracy-driven attention, and individuating processes

How might being outcome dependent on another person influence the processes that one uses to form impressions of that person? We designed three experiments to investigate this question with respect to short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency. In all three experiments, subjects expected to interact with a young man formerly hospitalized as a schizophrenic, and they received information about the person's attributes in either written profiles or videotapes. In Experiment 1, short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency led subjects to use relatively individuating processes (i.e., to base their impressions of the patient on his particular attributes), even under conditions that typically lead subjects to use relatively category-based processes (i.e., to base their impressions on the patient's schizophrenic label). Moreover, in the conditions that elicited individuating processes, subjects spent more time attending to the patient's particular attribute information. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the attention effects in Experiment 1 were not merely a function of impression positivity and that outcome dependency did not influence the impression formation process when attribute information in addition to category-level information was unavailable. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated not outcome dependency but the attentional goal of forming an accurate impression. We found that accuracy-driven attention to attribute information also led to individuating processes. The results of the three experiments indicate that there are important influences of outcome dependency on impression formation. These results are consistent with a model in which the tendency for short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency to facilitate individuating impression formation processes is mediated by an increase in accuracy-driven attention to attribute information.     

The role of negative features in joint and separate evaluation

Separate and joint evaluations differ in the manner in which attribute information is processed. We propose that negative attributes weigh more in separate compared to joint ratings. To assess the relative weights of positive and negative attributes, stimuli were employed containing mixed attribute valence, with good and poor attributes. In three experiments it was demonstrated empirically that, using such mixed valence options, the negative attributes indeed weighed more than the positive ones in separate compared to joint ratings. Direct evidence for the increased weight of negative attributes in separate ratings was provided by showing preference shifts between joint and separate ratings for options with mixed attribute valence. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Structure Compatibility and Restructuring in Judgment and Choice

The use of different response modes has been found to influence how subjects evaluate pairs of alternatives described by two attributes. It has been suggested that judgments and choices evoke different kinds of cognitive processes, leading to an overweighing of the prominent attribute in choice (Tversky, Sattath, & Slovic, 1988; Fischer & Hawkins, 1993). Four experiments were conducted to compare alternative cognitive explanations of this so-called prominence effect in judgment and choice. The explanations investigated were the structure compatibility hypothesis and the restructuring hypothesis. According to the structure compatibility hypothesis, it was assumed that the prominence effect is due to a lack of compatibility between the required output from subjects and the structure of information in input. The restructuring hypothesis stated that the decision maker uses mental restructuring operations on a representation of decision options to make the options more clearly differentiated. In Experiment 1, a matching procedure was used to provide pairs of equally attractive options (medical treatments) for the following experiments. In Experiments 2, 3, and 4, preferences were elicited with two different response modes, choice and preference rating. Value ranges on the prominent and nonprominent attributes were manipulated to test the structure compatibility hypothesis. Accountability was also subject to manipulation as it was assumed to stimulate restructuring. Since the prominence effect was not restricted to choices, and effects of value ranges were obtained but not of accountability, the results were interpreted in line with the structure compatibility hypothesis.     

Numbers,thoughts, and things: The Ontology of numbers for children and adults

Keil's predicability method for studying ontological categories was adapted to examine the conceptions of numbers of 5-year-old children versus adults. Our primary focus was on the ontological distinction between numbers and sets of objects, which is clearly in place by age 5 and continues to organize adults' ontological judgments about numbers. Children, like, adults, attribute spatial-arrangement properties to collections much more than to numbers, although they see both numbers and collections as having quantitative properties. Children were also similar to adults in that they equated numbers more closely with their written representations (numerals) than with spoken representations (number words).     

Towards a psychology of photography: dimensions underlying aesthetic appeal of photographs

With the aim to contribute to the development of a psychology of photography, this study examined what attributes are the major determinants of aesthetic appeal of photographs. Two interlinked experiments were conducted with 564 photographs having a wide range of motifs. Exp. 1 consisted of sorting by aesthetic appeal and adjective generation. In Exp. 2, attribute scaling was collected. Multidimensional scaling analysis of the photographs yielded three dimensions identified with the aid of attribute scales combined with measures of the manifest content of the photographs. The three dimensions were Hedonic Tone-Familiarity, Absence of color, and Expressiveness-Dynamics. The present results suggested that participants' familiarity with the photographs, the types of photographs (Color or Black & White), and the photographs' dynamics all affected participants' judgments of aesthetic appeal. Hedonic Tone and Expressiveness apparently mediated the participants' judgments.     

认知诊断属性分类一致性信度区间估计三种方法

摘要：引入了三种可以估计认知诊断属性分类一致性信度置信区间的方法：Bootstrap法、平行测验法和平行测验配对法。用模拟研究验证和比较了这三种方法的表现,结果发现,平行测验法和Bootstrap法在被试量比较少、题目数量比较少的情况下,估计的标准误和置信区间较接近,但是随着被试量的增加,Bootstrap法的估计精度提高较快,在被试量大和题目数量较多时基本接近平行测验配对法的结果。Bootstrap法的所需时间最少,平行测验配对法计算过程复杂且用时较长,推荐用Bootstrap法估计认知诊断属性分类一致性信度的置信区间。     

The impact of task complexity on information use in multi-attribute decision making

This study presents a process analysis of multi-attribute decision making. The decision problems concerned the selection of the most suitable candidate for a job opening. The problems varied in terms of complexity, i.e. the number of candidates and the number of attributes used to describe these alternatives. Results show that with an increasing number of alternatives, subjects (N = 48) used fewer attributes for the evaluation of alternatives, and made, on average, less references to the alternatives. The type of judgment most often used was absolute dimensional (comparison of an attribute to an absolute standard) and was used more often at the beginning than toward the end of the decision process. Overall, judgments were predominantly positive. The percentage of positive judgments decreased with increasing complexity, and toward the end of the decision process. Significantly more judgments, particularly positive ones, concerned the finally chosen alternative as compared to the rest of the alternatives. Finally, analysis of subjects' usage of decision rules revealed that increasing the number of alternatives resulted in an increasing use of elimination strategies. Implications of these findings for the design of decision aids will be discussed.