Integrating Fast and Frugal Heuristics with a Model of Memory‐based Cue Generation

Although the fast and frugal heuristics have been studied extensively, relatively little attention has been paid to how cues are generated to be used within the heuristics. The goal of this paper is to propose and test a memory‐based model of how cues are generated and used in cue‐based inferences. The current study advances theory by integrating the fast and frugal heuristics with HyGene, a memory‐based model of how decision makers generate and evaluate hypotheses. Using archival data in which memory retrieval variables were not directly manipulated, we demonstrate that participants' cue selection behavior is consistent with memory‐based retrieval. Further, by directly manipulating memory retrieval within a cue‐based stock‐forecasting task, we demonstrate that memory processes underlie cue use. Participants' cue use varied depending on the relationship between cue validity and the frequency with which the cues were seen during learning. The HyGene model provided the best account of the empirical data, providing further evidence for the critical role of memory in judgment and decision making. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developmental changes in children's inductive inferences for biological concepts: implications for the development of essentialist beliefs

We examined developmental changes in children's inductive inferences about biological concepts as a function of knowledge of properties and concepts. Specifically, 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds and 9‐ to 10‐year‐olds were taught either familiar or unfamiliar internal, external, or functional properties about known and unknown target animals. Children were asked to infer whether each of four probes, varying in categorical and perceptual similarity to the target, also shared that property. Overall, children made more inferences for known concepts and familiar properties. Older children were more likely to use categorical than perceptual information when making inferences about internal and functional properties of known concepts; however, younger children, in general, made no distinction for property type, and they weighted categorical and perceptual information similarly. Both age groups utilized appearance when making inferences about external properties. Results are discussed in terms of developmental changes in children's appreciation of essentialism. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Judging judges: How do children weigh the importance of capability and objectivity for being a good decision maker?

Two studies examined developmental differences in how children weigh capability and objectivity when evaluating potential judges. In Study 1, 84 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds and adults were told stories about pairs of judges that varied in capability (i.e., perceptual capacity) and objectivity (i.e., the relationship to a contestant) and were asked to predict which judge would be more accurate. Participants generally preferred capable over incapable judges. Additionally, 10‐ and 12‐year‐olds adjusted their preferences for the most capable judge based on objectivity information. Seventy 6‐ and 8‐year‐olds participated in Study 2, which was similar to Study 1 except that the judges could both seem incapable unless children understood how different decisions require different kinds of perceptual capabilities. While 8‐year‐olds chose judges based on the relevance of the perceptual capability, 6‐year‐olds struggled, seeming to be distracted by the valence of the judges’ relationships to the contestants. Overall, these results support that there are important shifts in how children evaluate decision makers from early to middle childhood.     

Developmental changes in attention: the effects of endogenous cueing and of distractors

We used two reaction time tasks to examine age differences in the ability to use an endogenous cue to shift attention covertly and to ignore distractors. In Experiment 1, 8‐year‐olds, 10‐year‐olds and adults (n = 24 per age) were asked to push a button as soon as they detected a target that was presented in a cued, miscued or non‐cued peripheral location at 100, 400 or 800 ms after the appearance of a central cue. In Experiment 2, 10‐year‐olds and adults (n = 24 per age) were asked to indicate which of two shapes appeared in the periphery 400 ms after a central cue, with those shapes surrounded by compatible or incompatible distractors. Unlike previous studies, the data were corrected for a reaction time bias that can inflate the apparent effect of cueing. Children were slower and more variable than adults overall. However, there were no age differences in the effects of the cues in either experiment: at all ages, the speed of responding was increased similarly by correct cueing and slowed similarly by incorrect cueing. Thus, under these conditions, the ability to use endogenous cues to orient covertly to the periphery is already adult‐like by 8–10 years of age, although there may be subsequent changes in the consistency of responding. In Experiment 2, 10‐year‐olds were slowed more than adults by incompatible distractors. Thus, the ability to ignore distracting information is not adult‐like even by 10 years of age. The findings suggest different rates of development for the ability to shift attention following an endogenous cue and for the ability to filter out irrelevant information.     

Do People Order Cues by Retrieval Fluency when Making Probabilistic Inferences?

In multiple‐cue probabilistic inferences, people infer alternatives' unknown values on decision criteria, using alternatives' attributes as cues. Some inferential strategies, like take‐the‐best, assume that people consider relevant cues sequentially in order of decreasing validity. This assumption has been deemed cognitively implausible by some, who suggest memory retrieval principles to guide cue order. We test whether memory‐based inferences are better described by a model considering cues in order of validity or in order of memory retrieval. In an experiment, we manipulated the frequency with which cues appeared in a learning phase, increasing retrieval fluency of cue values related to the more frequently appearing cue. In a subsequent decision phase, participants made a series of two‐alternative decisions based on the learned cue values. We compared two sequential sampling models, which differed in whether cues are sampled in order of subjective cue validity or in order of retrieval fluency. To model retrieval order of cues in the fluency sampling model, we used the declarative memory theory embedded in the ACT‐R cognitive architecture. Most participants' decisions were best described by the model sampling cues in order of memory retrieval. Only a minority of participants were classified as sampling cues by validity. Our result suggests that retrieval fluency is the primary driver of cue order in inferences from memory, irrespective of the cues' validities. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of perceptual distinctiveness on the prospective and retrospective components of prospective memory in young and old adults.

In two experiments, the effect of perceptual distinctiveness of cues on prospective memory performance was examined. Young and older adults completed a visual search task with embedded prospective memory instructions. On each trial, participants were asked to indicate the position of a target letter in a letter string, unless either of two letters previously identified as prospective memory cues was presented. Each prospective cue was associated with a specific response. Perceptual distinctiveness was manipulated by spatially displacing a single letter. The prospective component (successful detection of the cue) and the retrospective memory component (recalling the correct response when a cue is detected) were measured separately. Perceptual displacement of cues modulated performance of the prospective component but not the retrospective component. Young adults successfully detected a larger proportion of cues (prospective component) than older adults. However, there were minimal effects of age and no effect of cue displacement on participants' ability to recall the intention once they detected a cue (retrospective component performance). Results are discussed within the context of current theoretical models of prospective memory.     

Effects of Gestures on Older Adults' Learning from Video‐based Models

This study investigated whether the positive effects of gestures on learning by decreasing working memory load, found in children and young adults, also apply to older adults, who might especially benefit from gestures given memory deficits associated with aging. Participants learned a problem‐solving skill by observing a video‐based modeling example, with the human model using gesture cues, with a symbolic cue, or without cues. It was expected that gesture compared with symbolic or no cues (i) improves learning and transfer performance, (ii) more in complex than simple problems, and (iii) especially in older adults. Although older adults' learning outcomes were lower overall than that of children and young adults, the results only revealed a time‐on‐task advantage of gesture over no cues in the learning phase for the older adults. In conclusion, the present study did not provide strong support for the effectiveness of gestures on learning from video‐based modeling example. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond naïve cue combination: salience and social cues in early word learning

Children learn their earliest words through social interaction, but it is unknown how much they rely on social information. Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference. In contrast, other theories argue that early word learning is largely a perceptual process in which young children map words onto salient objects. One way of unifying these accounts is to model word learning as weighted cue combination, in which children attend to many potential cues to reference, but only gradually learn the correct weight to assign each cue. We tested four predictions of this kind of naïve cue combination account, using an eye‐tracking paradigm that combines social word teaching and two‐alternative forced‐choice testing. None of the predictions were supported. We thus propose an alternative unifying account: children are sensitive to social information early, but their ability to gather and deploy this information is constrained by domain‐general cognitive processes. Developmental changes in children's use of social cues emerge not from learning the predictive power of social cues, but from the gradual development of attention, memory, and speed of information processing.     

What makes relational reasoning smart? Revisiting the perceptual‐to‐relational shift in the development of generalization

Development of reasoning is often depicted as involving increasing use of relational similarities and decreasing use of perceptual similarities (‘the perceptual‐to‐relational shift’). We argue that this shift is a special case of a broader developmental trend: increasing sensitivity to the predictive accuracy of different similarity types. To test this hypothesis, we asked participants (3‐, 4‐, 5‐year‐olds and adults) to generalize novel information on two types of problems – offspring problems, where relational matches yield accurate generalizations, and prey problems, where perceptual matches yield accurate generalizations. On offspring problems, we replicated prior findings of increasing relational matches with age. However, we observed decreasing relational matches on prey problems. Provided feedback on their responses, 3‐year‐olds showed the same trend. Findings suggest that the relational shift commonly observed in categorization and analogical reasoning may reflect a general increase in children's sensitivity to cue validity rather than an overall preference to generalize over perceptual similarity.     

Nonspecific verbal cues alleviate forgetting by young children

Verbal reminders play a pervasive role in memory retrieval by human adults. In fact, relatively nonspecific verbal information (e.g. ‘Remember the last time we ate at that restaurant?’) will often cue vivid recollections of a past event even when presented outside the original encoding context. Although research has shown that memory retrieval by young children can be initiated by physical cues and by highly specific verbal cues, the effect of less specific verbal cues is not known. Using a Visual Recognition Memory (VRM) procedure, we examined the effect of nonspecific verbal cues on memory retrieval by 4‐year‐old children. Our findings showed that nonspecific verbal cues were as effective as highly specific nonverbal cues in facilitating memory retrieval after a 2‐week delay. We conclude that, at least by 4 years of age, children are able to use nonspecific verbal reminders to cue memory retrieval, and that the VRM paradigm may be particularly valuable in examining the age at which this initially occurs.     

Children's recognition of time in the causes and cures of physical and emotional reactions to illnesses and injuries

The present set of studies examined children's and college students' recognition of the role of time in the manifestation of causes and cures for illnesses and injuries. In Study 1, participants ranging from 4‐year‐olds through college students were presented with biological, moral, psychological, and irrelevant causes for illness symptoms and were asked how much time elapsed between the cause and the symptom. They were also asked if medicine would make the person feel better and if so how much time elapsed between taking the medicine and feeling better. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds. Study 3 examined whether 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds and college students could differentiate between physical and emotional reactions to illnesses and injuries, with regard to time course. Overall, young children underestimate how long it takes for illness symptoms to emerge (expecting them to result right away following exposure to contamination). Nonetheless, children generated longer timelines for biological cures than biological causes. Moreover, 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds expect physical and emotional reactions to follow different time courses. These results suggest that young children have a nascent expectation that biological events are distinct from non‐biological events, in how they unfold over time.     

Judging trustworthiness from faces: Emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments in young children

By adulthood, people judge trustworthiness from appearances rapidly and reliably. However, we know little about these judgments in children. This novel study investigates the developmental trajectory of explicit trust judgments from faces, and the contribution made by emotion cues across age groups. Five‐, 7‐, 10‐year‐olds, and adults rated the trustworthiness of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces with neutral expressions. The same participants also rated faces displaying overt happy and angry expressions, allowing us to investigate whether emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments similarly in children and adults. Results revealed that the ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of faces emerges in childhood, but may not be adult like until 10 years of age. Moreover, we show that emotion cues modulate trust judgments in young children, as well as adults. Anger cues diminished the appearance of trustworthiness for participants from 5 years of age and happy cues increased it, although this effect did not consistently emerge until later in childhood, that is, 10 years of age. These associations also extended to more subtle emotion cues present in neutral faces. Our results indicate that young children are sensitive to facial trustworthiness, and suggest that similar expression cues modulate these judgments in children and adults.     

Knowing about not remembering: developmental dissociations in lack‐of‐memory monitoring

Children aged 7 and younger encounter great difficulty in assessing whether lack of memory for an event indicates that the event was not experienced. The present research investigated whether this difficulty results from a general inability to evaluate memory absence or from a specific inability to monitor one feature of memory absence that has been examined in previous studies, namely expected memorability. Seven‐, 8‐ and 9‐year‐olds, and adults (N = 72) enacted, imagined and confabulated about bizarre and common actions. Two weeks later, participants were asked to recognize the actions that had been enacted. Even 7‐year‐olds monitored the relative familiarity of rejected distracters (i.e. reported higher confidence for the rejection of novel versus imagined and confabulated distracters). However, only older children and adults exhibited the ability to monitor expected memorability (e.g. reported higher confidence for the rejection of bizarre versus common distracters). These results suggest that young children exhibit specific, rather than general, deficits in monitoring memory absence, and provide an indication of the specific domains in which lack‐of‐memory monitoring improves during childhood.     

Retrospective cues based on object features improve visual working memory performance in older adults

Research with younger adults has shown that retrospective cues can be used to orient top-down attention toward relevant items in working memory. We examined whether older adults could take advantage of these cues to improve memory performance. Younger and older adults were presented with visual arrays of five colored shapes; during maintenance, participants were presented either with an informative cue based on an object feature (here, object shape or color) that would be probed, or with an uninformative, neutral cue. Although older adults were less accurate overall, both age groups benefited from the presentation of an informative, feature-based cue relative to a neutral cue. Surprisingly, we also observed differences in the effectiveness of shape versus color cues and their effects upon post-cue memory load. These results suggest that older adults can use top-down attention to remove irrelevant items from visual working memory, provided that task-relevant features function as cues.     

The role of inference in children's comprehension and memory for sentences

In a series of studies, young children often failed to construct and remember inferred relationships which they were capable of understanding. A cued recall procedure was employed to assess the relative effectiveness of implicit and explicit word prompts for sentence memory. The implicit cues were much less effective than the explicit cues for 6–7 yr old children while the cue types did not differ for 11–12 yr olds. Instructions to imitate the actions described by the sentences eliminated the memory difference for the young children. Developmental improvement in spontaneous inferential operations and intentional plans to remember are mechanisms which appear to yield an elaborated memory representation and greater access routes through indirect and implied relationships.     

Mental reinstatement of the misinformation context and the misinformation effect in children and adults

The present study investigated the effects of mental reinstatement of the context in which misleading information about an event was presented on later recognition memory for the event. Five‐year‐olds, 7‐year‐olds and adults were shown a short video depicting a children's adventure and were asked a set of misleading questions to introduce misinformation one week later. Before the recognition memory test was administered another week later, half of the participants were given instructions to mentally reinstate the context of the misleading interview. Memory was assessed with a set of forced‐choice recognition questions once in the misleading interview context and for the children a second time at home one week later. When participants were instructed to mentally reinstate the context of the misleading interview prior to the recognition test, false memory reports occurred more often for adults than for children and had a stronger impact on peripheral information than on central information for both 7‐year‐olds and adults. When 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds were tested at home, false memory reports decreased. Thus, reinstating the context of an interview introducing misinformation can reduce the accuracy of memory reports; the context dependence of both accurate and inaccurate memory reports in children and adults is discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The mathematics of sharing / Las matemáticas que realizan los niños al compartir

Abstract

The purpose of sharing is to construct equivalent sets, making it an ideal context for analysing important quantitative concepts such as counting, equivalence and cardinality. Two studies analysed how four- and five-year-olds shared blocks in equal sharing and reciprocity conditions and their number inferences about one set after counting the other. The researcher asked children to share double and single blocks between two characters. They succeeded more in building equivalent shares in an equal sharing than reciprocity condition. Most children who shared correctly also made appropriate number inferences. To examine whether perceptual cues helped children share the blocks, a second study used Canadian $1 and $2 coins. A double block is twice the size of a single, whereas there is no visual cue about the value relation between coins because they are the same size. Unexpectedly, children shared equally well with blocks and coins, and most children made number inferences.     

The ontogeny of relational memory and pattern separation

Episodic memory relies on memory for the relations among multiple elements of an event and the ability to discriminate among similar elements of episodes. The latter phenomenon, termed pattern separation, has been studied mainly in young and older adults with relatively little research on children. Building on prior work with young children, we created an engaging computer‐administered relational memory task assessing what‐where relations. We also modified the Mnemonic Similarity Task used to assess pattern discrimination in young and older adults for use with preschool children. Results showed that 4‐year‐olds performed significantly worse than 6‐year‐olds and adults on both tasks, whereas 6‐year‐olds and adults performed comparably, even though there were no ceiling effects. However, performance on the two tasks did not correlate, suggesting that two distinct mnemonic processes with different developmental trajectories may contribute to age‐related changes in episodic memory.     

Does the cue help? Children's understanding of multiplicative concepts in different problem contexts

Background: Understanding arithmetical principles is a key part of a conceptual understanding of mathematics. However, very little attention has been paid to children's understanding of multiplicative, as compared to additive, principles. Aims: This study investigated(a) children's ability to use commutative and distributive cues to solve multiplication problems, (b) whether their ability to use these cues depends on the problem context, and(c) whether separate mechanisms might underlie children's understanding of commutativity and distributivity. Sample: Twenty‐seven 9‐year‐olds (Year 5) and thirty‐two 10‐year‐olds (Year 6). Methods: Forty‐eight multiplication problems (with a multiple‐choice response format) were presented to children. There were four types of problem: Commutative, Distributive, Combined commutative‐distributive(all preceded by a cue) and No cue problems. Each type of problem was presented in three different contexts: Isomorphism of measures, Area, and Cartesian product. Results: Children demonstrated a good understanding of commutativity but a very poor understanding of distributivity. A common mistake in the distributive problems was to select the number that was one more, or one less, than the answer in the cue. Children's understanding of distributivity (butnot commutativity) seemed to depend on the problem context. Factor analysis suggested that separate factors underlie the ability to solve commutative and distributive problems. Conclusions: Nine‐ and 10‐year‐olds understand commutativity, but are unable to use the distributive principle in multiplication. Their errors suggest that they may confuse some of the principles of multiplication with those of addition. When children do begin to understand the principle of distributivity, they most easily apply it in the context of Isomorphism of measures multiplication problems. The implications for mathematical education are discussed.     

The effects of stimulus density on children’s analysis of hierarchical patterns

In three experiments, 4‐, 5‐, 6‐ and 8‐year‐olds and adults were asked to draw hierarchical letter and geometric forms from memory. Across the experiments, the number of elements comprising the hierarchical models was systematically varied. For each drawing of a hierarchical form, the quality of the participant’s reproduction of global and local level information was evaluated separately. Results showed that young children demonstrated significant analytic competence. However, the data also suggested that changes in stimulus density were more disruptive, in specific ways, to 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children’s processing than to that of the older children and adults.