Subadditivity in Memory for Personal Events

Abstract—People's subjective probability judgments of external events are often subadditive (i.e., the probability estimates of component parts of a single event sum to greater than one)—a clear violation of the extensional nature of probability theory. We show that people's frequency judgments of personal events can also be subadditive. We found subadditivity even when component events made up a proper subset of a wider composite event. Our findings imply that the somewhat arbitrary choice of the specificity with which questions are asked can produce widely different reports for the same composite events.     

Apparent movement and metacontrast suppression: A decisional analysis

Three test and three mask energies were varied orthogonally and randomly over trials. The stimulus onset asynchrony (ISOA) separating test and mask was varied between trial blocks within each of two display conditions, apparent movement (two-object) and metacontrast (threeobject). Subjects were required to makebrightness judgments of both test and mask energies by responding “bright,” “medium,” or “dim” with respect to the apparent intensity of each stimulus. The accuracy and the coherence lconsistencyt of test judgments were U-shaped functions of SOA for both apparent movement and metacontrast situations. However, the accuracy and the coherence of mask judgments did not vary with SOA for either apparent movement or metacontrast. It was noted that substantially the same results have been reported previously when subjects were required to makecontour judgments. Hence, it is argued that apparent movement and metacontrast suppression are intimately related.     

Fairness and preference

Two equity models were evaluated by fitting them to subjects' judgments of the fairness of payment distributions to “self” and “other” under hypothetical work situations. Neither the E. Walster, G. W. Walster, and E. Berscheid (Equity: Theory and Research, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1978) equity formulation nor Harris' (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1976, 12, 194–209) linear model adequately accounted for the fairness judgments regardless of whether self worked more or less than other. Subjects also were asked to indicate their most preferred payment distributions and these preferences were significantly different from the fairness judgments. Results suggested that fairness judgments were influenced by a bias in the direction of overpayment to self.     

The Effect of Evidential Impact on Perceptual Probabilistic Judgments

In a series of three behavioral experiments, we found a systematic distortion of probability judgments concerning elementary visual stimuli. Participants were briefly shown a set of figures that had two features (e.g., a geometric shape and a color) with two possible values each (e.g., triangle or circle and black or white). A figure was then drawn, and participants were informed about the value of one of its features (e.g., that the figure was a “circle”) and had to predict the value of the other feature (e.g., whether the figure was “black” or “white”). We repeated this procedure for various sets of figures and, by varying the statistical association between features in the sets, we manipulated the probability of a feature given the evidence of another (e.g., the posterior probability of hypothesis “black” given the evidence “circle”) as well as the support provided by a feature to another (e.g., the impact, or confirmation, of evidence “circle” on the hypothesis “black”). Results indicated that participants’ judgments were deeply affected by impact, although they only should have depended on the probability distributions over the features, and that the dissociation between evidential impact and posterior probability increased the number of errors. The implications of these findings for lower and higher level cognitive models are discussed.     

A study identifying the origins of different types of drink driving events through the lens of deterrence: Is it alcohol abuse or avoiding detection?

BackgroundWhile attempts to identify the mechanisms to effectively deter drink driving remains a central focus for road safety researchers, scant scientific enquiry has simultaneously examined perceptions of apprehension risk in combination with substance abuse. This may be considered a significant oversight given that such constructs may create opposing forces, or alternatively, alcohol abuse and punishment avoidance may create cumulative effects and promote offending behaviours.MethodThis paper reports on an investigation of 718 Queensland motorists' self-reported perceptions of classical and reconceptualised deterrence constructs (as well as alcohol consumption) in order to determine what factors have the greatest effect on promoting drink driving, particularly alcohol consumption or punishment avoidance. The sample completed an online or paper version of the questionnaire.Results“Possible” drink driving events were slightly more common (25.5%) than “acknowledged” drink driving events (16.6%). Future intentions to drink and drive (23.4%) were more common among those who reported an “acknowledged” drink driving event (63.5% reported future intentions to drink drive) than a “possible” drink driving event (47.5%). Sequential binary logistic regression models conducted for each drink driving category revealed that having “risky” drinking behaviour and both direct personal and indirect experience of punishment for a drink driving offence were predictors of “possible” drink driving events. Similarly, “acknowledged” drink driving had the same significant predictors with the addition of increases in age and punishment severity reducing the likelihood of drink driving and direct punishment avoidance having a positive effect. However, and importantly, only direct punishment avoidance and past “possible” and “acknowledged” drink driving events predicted future intentions to offend in the final model, which further reinforces that drink driving is a deliberate decision (rather than stemming primarily from impairment).Practical applications: The findings provide support for increased policing efforts to identify drink drivers.     

Expertise and the explanation effect

The effect of professional experience on the “explanation effect”, i.e., generation of an explanation for an event occurrence increasing the judged likelihood of the event, is investigated in a risk assessment (financial auditing) context. An explanation effect was predicted for inexperienced auditors (auditing students); however, audit judgment experience was predicted to mediate, or eliminate, any explanation effect. Two competing hypotheses for the origin of the effect, the causal construction and recall-availability hypotheses, are tested given the presence of antecedent conditions for, and against, the explanation events. Audit risk judgments were provided by 58 novice and 42 experienced auditors. Written explanation for occurrence of the target event resulted in the explanation effect for novice subjects, both for specifie event and aggregate risk assessments. The pattern of results supported the recallavailability over the causal construction hypothesis. The judgments of the experienced auditors, however, did not indicate any explanation effect.     

Experimental Tests of Risk Ladders in the Elicitation of Perceived Likelihood

Risk ladders have the potential to improve numeric judgments of low‐likelihood events by providing information about the likelihoods of comparison risks, thereby letting respondents make risk estimates “in context.” However, to date this tool has been studied systematically only in communication of risk, not in elicitation of perceived likelihoods. In three studies, we evaluated the benefits of risk ladders on the consistency, validity, and mean‐level accuracy of elicited likelihood judgments. When estimates for low‐likelihood hazards were elicited using different numeric response scales (e.g., “1 in x” and “x in 100,000”), scale type had a strong effect on the magnitudes of the elicited estimates, and viewing a risk ladder (Experiment 1) or comparison risks (Experiments 2 and 3) did not attenuate this effect of scale type. Similarly, we found no evidence that risk ladders or comparison risks improved the convergent validity of numeric estimates, as measured using correlations with risk ratings made on alternative scale types. Finally, viewing comparison risks tended to reduce gross overestimation of rare events, with relatively less change in estimates for mid‐likelihood and high‐likelihood hazards. This suggests that comparison risks can spread responses to cover a wider range of values but do not ameliorate scale effects. In the elicitation of numeric risk estimates, how you ask matters, even if you let people make estimates “in context” through the use of comparative risk information. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Event Semantics: A Husserlian Critique

Event semantics is concerned with the formal structure of sentences which appear to describe an event of some kind, e.g. ‘Brutus kills Caesar,’ or ‘My tooth fell out.’ Phenomenologists should be interested in work in this field, if they hope to rescue Husserl’s phenomenology of judgment from its narrow focus on copular judgments of the form ‘S is p.’ An adequate phenomenology of judgment must ultimately develop an account of judgments whose intentional correlates seem to be events, rather than states of affairs, since such judgments are ubiquitous. For this endeavor, existing work on the formal structure of event sentences provides a crucial foothold. However, phenomenologists cannot simply import semantic theories for their own use, without first evaluating them for phenomenological plausibility. This concern is particularly acute in the case of the widely-adopted “Davidsonian” approach, according to which the logical structure of event sentences diverges radically from natural language syntax. The Davidsonian form introduces a “covert” variable, which stands in for an event. Thus, the sentence ‘Brutus kills Caesar’ becomes, ‘There is an event e that is a killing of Caesar by Brutus.’ Such a theory, if correct, would have decisive consequences for the phenomenology of event sentences, and even of events themselves. Yet the introduction of covert variables in turn introduces—I argue—a covert intentional object, without assessing this idea for phenomenological plausibility. Building on Husserl’s phenomenology of predication, I develop a criterion for evaluating this hypothesis, and argue that the Davidsonian approach, as it stands, is phenomenologically untenable.     

Understanding conjunction effects in probability judgments: the role of implicit mental models

Subjective probability judgments often violate a normative principle in that the conjunction of two events is judged to be more likely than the probability of either of the two events occurring separately. Most previous explanations of these conjunction effects have assumed that probability judgments depend on some psychological relation (e.g. representativeness) between the constituents mentioned explicitly in the stimulus information. In contrast, the present approach highlights the fundamental role of implicitly inferred information. Participants are assumed to transform the explicit stimulus information into implicit mental models in their attempt to make sense of the experimental task. Probability judgments should then reflect the degree of activation of such a mental model in memory given a set of propositions, rather than the quantitative fit or likelihood of the propositions themselves. Two studies are reported which provide converging evidence for the proposed mental model approach. In the first study, using graded conjunctions of one to five propositions, probability judgments are shown to vary as a function of the activation of a mental model rather than the likelihood of the component events. In a second study, a priming procedure is employed to activate mental models that either fit an event conjunction or do not, leading to an increase or decrease of conjunction effects in probability judgment. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Visual imagery: The past and future as seen by patients with Alzheimer’s disease

We investigated visual imagery for past and future thinking in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). We invited AD patients and controls to retrieve past events and to imagine future events. Participants also provided a “Field” response if they see the event through their own eyes, or an “Observer” response if they see themselves in the scene as a spectator would. Less “Field” and more “Observer” responses were observed in AD participants than in controls during past and future thinking, suggesting a diminished ability to mentally visualize past and future events in AD. Results also demonstrated significant positive correlations between the production of “Field” responses and specificity during past and future thinking, suggesting a relationship between the ability to mentally visualize past and future events and autobiographical overgenerality in AD.     

风险决策的概率权重偏差：心理机制与优化策略

概率权重偏差指人对事件发生的主观概率估计与客观概率的差异。它影响投资、投保、医患沟通等方面。“重结果轻概率”的非补偿性策略和参照点诱发的情绪波动会引发概率权重偏差; 改变“概率”的描述形式、“结果”的情绪体验、“损益”的参照点、风险的心理距离等可调整权重偏差、优化决策。未来需深究权重偏差的适用情境、机制关联及偏差辨别等问题。     

Inferring the biggest and best: A measurement model for applying recognition to evoke consideration sets and judge between multiple alternatives

It has long been supposed that preference judgments between sets of to-be-considered possibilities are made by means of initially winnowing down the most promising-looking alternatives to form smaller “consideration sets” (Howard, 1963, Wright and Barbour, 1977). In preference choices with >2 options, it is standard to assume that a “consideration set”, based upon some simple criterion, is established to reduce the options available. Inferential judgments, in contrast, have more frequently been investigated in situations in which only two possibilities need to be considered (e.g., which of these two cities is the larger?) Proponents of the “fast and frugal” approach to decision-making suggest that such judgments are also made on the basis of limited, simple criteria. For example, if only one of two cities is recognized and the task is to judge which city has the larger population, the recognition heuristic states that the recognized city should be selected. A multinomial processing tree model is outlined which provides the basis for estimating the extent to which recognition is used as a criterion in establishing a consideration set for inferential judgments between three possible options.     

Counselor Confidence and Accuracy of Prognoses of Success or Failure

This study assessed the accuracy of predictions of freshman and overall college scholastic performance made by groups of high school counselors, college advisors, and counseling psychologists from a university counseling center in relation to the confidence of these judges that their prognoses were accurate. Predictions were made from three sets of case information. The results revealed that: (1) the degree of confidence counselors indicated in their freshman and overall college “pass” predictions was appropriately related to accuracy; (2) counselor confidence in freshman “fail” predictions was not related to accuracy although the “fail” judgments tended to be more accurate than the “pass” prognoses; (3) counselor confidence in their overall “fail” predictions was not significantly related to accuracy and, unlike the results for the freshman judgments, the overall “fail” predictions were not more accurate than the “pass” predictions; (4) the amount of case data available was not related to counselor predictive accuracy.     

Being Emotional about the Past: On the Nature and Role of Past‐Directed Emotions*

We sometimes experience emotions which are directed at past events (or situations) which we witnessed at the time when they occurred (or obtained). The present paper explores the role which such “autobiographically past‐directed emotions” (or “APD‐emotions”) play in a subject's mental life. A defender of the “Memory‐Claim” holds that an APD‐emotion is a memory, namely a memory of the emotion which the subject experienced at the time when the event originally occurred (or the situation obtained) towards which the APD‐emotion is directed. On this view, APD‐emotions might play an important role in our acquiring knowledge about our own past emotions, which renders the view rather attractive. However, as I show in the present paper, none of the various possible versions of the Memory‐Claim are tenable. This leaves us with the “Universal‐New‐Emotion‐Claim”, according to which all APD‐emotions are new emotional responses to the past events (or situations) towards which the relevant APD‐emotions are directed. Further consideration of the “Universal‐New‐Emotion‐Claim” shows that while APD‐emotions do not play the epistemological role they could have played had some version of the Memory‐Claim turned out to be true, a subject's APD‐emotions nevertheless do play a vital role in a subject's mental life: they help the subject to develop a balanced sense of self.     

Conditioned Assessment of Subjective Probabilities: Identifying the Benefits of Decomposition

Conditioned assessment of subjective probability decomposes an assessment task by using a related event to define a series of conditional probabilities. These component assessments are subsequently aggregated mathematically. Two experiments compared conditioned and unconditioned (direct) assessments of 32 general knowledge questions by graduate business students. Reliability was estimated through repeat administration of the questionnaire and accuracy was measured with a quadratic scoring rule. Conditioned assessments were more reliable and more accurate than direct assessments, confirming previous research on other decomposition approaches. Conditioned assessment appears to be effective because the mathematical combination of conditional probabilities reduces random response errors and reduces the tendency to produce overly extreme probability judgments. Implications for further research and application are considered.     

Shindigs,brunches, and rodeos: The neural basis of event words

Events (e.g., “running” or “eating”) constitute a basic type within human cognition and human language. We asked whether thinking about events, as compared to other conceptual categories, depends on partially independent neural circuits. Indirect evidence for this hypothesis comes from previous studies showing elevated posterior temporal responses to verbs, which typically label events. Neural responses to verbs could, however, be driven either by their grammatical or by their semantic properties. In the present experiment, we separated the effects of grammatical class (verb vs. noun) and semantic category (event vs. object) by measuring neural responses to event nouns (e.g., “the hurricane”). Participants rated the semantic relatedness of event nouns, as well as of two categories of object nouns—animals (e.g., “the alligator”) and plants (e.g., “the acorn”)—and three categories of verbs—manner of motion (e.g., “to roll”), emission (e.g., “to sparkle”), and perception (e.g., “to gaze”). As has previously been observed, we found larger responses to verbs than to object nouns in the left posterior middle (LMTG) and superior (LSTG) temporal gyri. Crucially, we also found that the LMTG responds more to event than to object nouns. These data suggest that part of the posterior lateral temporal response to verbs is driven by their semantic properties. By contrast, a more superior region, at the junction of the temporal and parietal cortices, responded more to verbs than to all nouns, irrespective of their semantic category. We concluded that the neural mechanisms engaged when thinking about event and object categories are partially dissociable.     

Upward versus Downward Anchoring in Frequency Judgments of Social Facts

Frequency estimation of social facts in two methods of judgment elicitation was investigated. In the “narrow-range” condition, subjects answered questions in the format: “Out of 100 incidents, how many belong to category X?” In the “wide-range” condition, the frequency for the same event was assessed with respect to “Out of 10,000”. Judged frequencies in the wide-range condition were divided by 100, and were compared with the corresponding judgments in the narrow-range condition. Such comparisons were made for low-frequency and high-frequency events. Previous research has shown that, for low-frequency events, judged frequencies are proportionally greater in the narrow-range than in the wide-range condition. These results reflect cognitive processes of implicit anchoring, whereby judged frequencies lie close to small numbers within the response ranges provided. I call this process “downward anchoring,” and predicted that this tendency would be replicated in the present study. Moreover, I predicted that assessments about high-frequency events would evoke similar cognitive processes operating in the opposite direction. By such “upward anchoring,” judged frequencies would lie close to relatively larger numbers within the given response ranges. Consequently, I predicted that judged frequencies for high-frequency events would be proportionally greater in the wide-range condition than in the narrow-range condition. These predictions were confirmed.     

The effect of constant outcome value on judgments and decision making given linguistic probabilities

Two experiments were performed to determine whether judgments of the relative chances of two independent events occurring are biased by constant outcome values contingent on the events when the uncertainties are specified by linguistic expressions (e.g. doubtful). In Experiment 1, subjects directly judged the relative chances of the two events, of which one was represented by a spinner and the other by a linguistic probability expression. In Experiment 2, only linguistic probability expressions were used to describe the two events and a betting procedure was used. A bias was evident in both studies, such that the relative judgments tended to favour the event with the positive rather than the negative contingent outcome. The bias was smaller for the low- than for the high-probability phrases. Individual differences were great, with the bias appearing strongly in only about one-third of the population. Theoretical implications of the present and related results are discussed.     

Speed and accuracy of same and different responses in perceptual matching

Models of the visual perceptual matching process are evaluated in two experiments in which the relative speeds of “same” and “different” responses were manipulated. In the first experiment, subjects were tested under two bias conditions: they were instructed to respond “same” only when sure or to respond “different” only when sure. Such bias is found to have a very large effect on the speed and accuracy of “same” and “different” responses, changing “same” responses from being faster than “different” responses (the usual result) in the sure “different” condition to being slower in the sure “same” condition. In the second experiment, the relative speed of “same” responses was slowed significantly by the addition of difficult “different” judgments. These results are used to argue against models that contain an identity matcher and against models that have separate components to account for errors and reaction time. We also point out that, although it is well known that the relative speeds of positive and negative responses are subject to bias manipulations, this fact has been ignored by many researchers in developing models in which the reaction time difference between positive and negative responses is used as a measure of a stage of processing.     

心境对未来事件发生概率判断的影响

本研究采用短影片人为诱发心境的方法,用正性和负性两种情绪事件作为刺激材料,在控制人格变量的前提下,探讨了大学生在不同心境下对未来事件发生概率的判断中是否存在心境一致性效应。结果表明：（1）愉悦心境会增加做出积极判断的倾向,悲伤心境会增加做出消极判断的倾向;（2）无论是在愉悦心境还是在悲伤心境中,被试在对未来事件发生概率的判断上不存在性别差异。结果支持心境对未来事件发生概率判断有所影响,即诱发的心境与未来事件的效价存在一致性效应。