Alleviating inflation of conditional predictions

Previous studies indicated that conditional predictions—the assessed probability that a certain outcome will occur given a certain condition—tend to be markedly inflated. Five experiments tested the effects of manipulations that were expected to alleviate this inflation by inducing participants to engage in analytic processing. Rewarding participants for accurate predictions proved ineffective. A training procedure in which participants assessed the likelihood of each of several outcomes before assessing the probability of a target outcome was partly effective in reducing overestimation. Most effective was the requirement to work in dyads and to come to an agreement about the assessed likelihood. Working in dyads helped alleviate prediction inflation even after participants made their individual predictions alone, and its debiasing effect also transferred to the estimates that were made individually on a new set of stimuli. The results were discussed in terms of the factors that make prediction inflation resistant to change.     

Was it designed to do that? Children's focus on intended function in their conceptualization of artifacts

Do young children who seek the conceptual kind of an artifact weigh the plausibility that a current function constitutes the function intended by the object designer? Three- and four-year-olds were encouraged to question adults about novel artifacts. After inquiring about what an object was, some children were shown a function that plausibly accounted for the structural features of the object; others were shown a possible, but implausible function. Children given implausible functions were less satisfied with these responses than those given plausible functions, as shown by their more persistent attempts to ask follow-up questions about function. Accordingly, preschoolers appear to take into account matters of intentional design when assigning artifacts to conceptual kinds.     

Object-based apparent motion

The interpretation of a dynamic visual scene requires integrating information within frames (grouping and completion) and across frames (correspondence matching). Fragmentary views of objects were used in five experiments. These views could not be matched with each other by any similarity transformation on the basis of their explicit visual features, but their completed versions were related by a rotational transformation. When the fragmentary images were successively presented to observers, it was found that they produced apparent motion in the picture plane and in depth. Thus, apparent motion is capable of establishing correspondence at the level of perceptually recovered objects in three-dimensional space.     

Phonetic symbolism and feeling of knowing

American subjects matched English antonym pairs with antonym pairs from Thai, Kannada, and Yoruba. For each match they also,indicated their degree of feeling of knowing (FOK). Although translation accuracy was in general better than chance, suggesting universal phonetic symbolism, it was found to vary considerably with the subject’s FOK ratings: Translations evoking stronger FOK were more likely to be correct than translations evoking weaker FOK, and matches which proved correct were assigned higher FOK ratings than matches which proved incorrect. Several implications of the finding that subjects can monitor their success in guessing the meaning of words from foreign languages are outlined.     

Belief in discourse representation theory

Conclusion I hope I have convinced the reader that DR theory offers at least some exciting potential when applied to the semantics of belief reports. It differs considerably from other approaches, and it makes intuitively acceptable predictions that other theories do not. The theory also provides a novel approach to the semantics of other propsitional attitude reports. Further, DR theory enables one to approach the topic of anaphora within belief and other propositional attitude contexts in a novel way, thus combining the semantics developed here with one of the theory's original motivations (Kamp, 1981a). However, these are unfortunately topics that I must reserve for another time.I am grateful to Dan Bonevac, Irene Heim, Richard Larson, Stan Peters, Rich Thomason and especially Hans Kamp and an anonymous reviewer for the Journal of Philosophical Logic for comments on previous drafts of this paper, as well as to The Center for Cognitive Science for research support.     

Mending metacognitive illusions: a comparison of mnemonic-based and theory-based procedures

Previous research indicated that learners experience an illusion of competence during learning (termed foresight bias) because judgments of learning (JOLs) are made in the presence of information that will be absent at test. The authors examined the following 2 procedures for alleviating foresight bias: enhancing learners' sensitivity to mnemonic cues pertaining to ease of retrieval and inducing learners to resort to theory-based judgments as a basis for JOLs. Both procedures proved effective in mending metacognitive illusions-as reflected in JOLs and self-regulation of study time-but only theory-based debiasing yielded transfer to new items. The results support the notion that improved metacognition is 1 key to optimizing transfer but also that educating subjective experience does not guarantee generalization to new situations.     

Perceptuomotor functioning in preschool children with symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Given limited research on perceptual-motor functioning of preschool children with symptoms of ADHD, the purpose of this study was to compare the fine motor, gross motor, visuomotor, and oral-motor functioning of 49 4- to 6-yr.-old children with symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and 48 typically developing children. Analysis showed scores of the ADHD group were significantly lower than those of the control group on all perceptuomotor measures. In addition, scores on all measures yielded significant correlations with scores on the Hyperactive-Inattentive scale of the Preschool Behavior Questionnaire. Regression analyses indicated that the scores of gross motor and visuomotor functioning were significant predictors of group classification (with and without ADHD). These findings extend the well documented findings of perceptuomotor deficits among school-age children with ADHD into the preschool period and emphasize the importance of early assessment and treatment of these deficits in young children with symptoms of ADHD.     

Behavioral and physiological measures in the detection of concealed information

The authors examined the incremental validity of the reaction time (RT) measure beyond that of skin conductance response (SCR) in the detection of concealed information. Participants performed a Stroop-like task in which they named the color of critical and neutral words. Results show that the SCR highly differentiated between the relevant and neutral words. However, the RT demonstrated a significant differentiation only when the critical words denoted personally significant items (e.g., one's own name) and not when they denoted crime-relevant items related to a simulated crime. In both cases, combining the 2 measures yielded no advantage over the use of SCR alone. Thus, although behavioral measures may differentiate between relevant and neutral information in some cases, their practical use is questionable.     

Illusions of competence in monitoring one's knowledge during study

The monitoring of one's own knowledge during study suffers from an inherent discrepancy between study and test situations: Judgments of learning (JOLs) are made in the presence of information that is absent but solicited during testing. The failure to discount the effects of that information when making JOLs can instill a sense of competence during learning that proves unwarranted during testing. Using a paired-associates task, the authors examined aspects of the cue-target relationships that seemed likely contributors to such illusions of competence. These aspects have the potential to create differential strengths of a priori and a posteriori associations, that is, the probability with which a cue, when presented alone, elicits the corresponding target versus the perceived association between the cue and the target when both are present. The authors argue that the former has the greater influence on later recall, whereas the latter has the greater influence on JOLs.     

Orientation asymmetry in the flanker task

Experiments 1 and 2 of this study show that when the target is either a vertical or a horizontal line, diagonal-line flankers tilted 45° either to the right or to the left have the same effect as do incongruent flankers. When the target is a diagonal line tilted either to the right or to the left, vertical- or horizontal-line flankers do not have the same effect as do incongruent flankers. Experiment 3 demonstrates that this asymmetry is not caused by the temporal-dynamic aspects of the processing. Together, these experiments suggest that there is an asymmetrical relation between diagonal lines and either vertical or horizontal lines otttside of the central focus of attention. Experiment 4 shows that despite this asymmetry in the flanker task, visual search for a vertical- or a horizontal-line target among diagonal-line distractors is not affected by the number of distractors. Possible explanations of this phenomenon are discussed.