Folkscience: coarse interpretations of a complex reality

The rise of appeals to intuitive theories in many areas of cognitive science must cope with a powerful fact. People understand the workings of the world around them in far less detail than they think. This illusion of knowledge depth has been uncovered in a series of recent studies and is caused by several distinctive properties of explanatory understanding not found in other forms of knowledge. Other experimental work has shown that people do have skeletal frameworks of expectations that constrain richer ad hoc theory construction on the fly. These frameworks are supplemented by an ability to evaluate and rely on the division of cognitive labour in one's culture, an ability shown to be present even in young children.     

Little Bayesians or little Einsteins? Probability and explanatory virtue in children's inferences

Like scientists, children seek ways to explain causal systems in the world. But are children scientists in the strict Bayesian tradition of maximizing posterior probability? Or do they attend to other explanatory considerations, as laypeople and scientists – such as Einstein – do? Four experiments support the latter possibility. In particular, we demonstrate in four experiments that 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children, like adults, have a robust latent scope bias that leads to inferences that do not maximize posterior probability. When faced with two explanations equally consistent with observed data, where one explanation makes an unverified prediction, children consistently preferred the explanation that does not make this prediction (Experiment 1), even if the prior probabilities are identical (Experiment 3). Additional evidence suggests that this latent scope bias may result from the same explanatory strategies used by adults (Experiments 1 and 2), and can be attenuated by strong prior odds (Experiment 4). We argue that children, like adults, rely on ‘explanatory virtues’ in inference – a strategy that often leads to normative responses, but can also lead to systematic error.     

Competition effects of threatening faces in social anxiety

Threatening faces involuntarily grab attention in socially anxious individuals. It is unclear, however, whether attention capture is at the expense of concurrent visual processing. The current study examined the perceptual cost effects of viewing fear-relevant stimuli (threatening faces) relative to a concurrent change-detection task. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were used to separate the neural response to 2 fully overlapping types of stimuli flickering at different frequencies: Task-irrelevant facial expressions (angry, neutral, happy) were overlaid with a task-relevant Gabor patch stream, which required a response to rare phase reversals. Groups of 17 high and 17 low socially anxious observers were recruited through online prescreening of 849 students. A prominent competition effect of threatening faces was observed solely in elevated social anxiety: When an angry face, relative to a neutral or happy face, served as a distractor, heightened ssVEP amplitudes were seen at the tagging frequency of that facial expression. Simultaneously, the ssVEP evoked by the task-relevant Gabor grating was reliably diminished compared with conditions with neutral or happy distractor faces. Thus, threatening faces capture and hold low-level perceptual resources in viewers symptomatic for social anxiety at the cost of a concurrent primary task. It is important to note that this competition in lower tier visual cortex was maintained throughout the viewing period and was unaccompanied by competition effects on behavioral performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

“End-of-life” biases in moral evaluations of others

When evaluating the moral character of others, people show a strong bias to more heavily weigh behaviors at the end of an individual’s life, even if those behaviors arise in light of an overwhelmingly longer duration of contradictory behavior. Across four experiments, we find that this “end-of-life” bias uniquely applies to intentional changes in behavior that immediately precede death, and appears to result from the inference that the behavioral change reflects the emergence of the individual’s “true self”.     

Causal structure learning over time: observations and interventions

Seven studies examined how people learn causal relationships in scenarios when the variables are temporally dependent - the states of variables are stable over time. When people intervene on X, and Y subsequently changes state compared to before the intervention, people infer that X influences Y. This strategy allows people to learn causal structures quickly and reliably when variables are temporally stable (Experiments 1 and 2). People use this strategy even when the cover story suggests that the trials are independent (Experiment 3). When observing variables over time, people believe that when a cause changes state, its effects likely change state, but an effect may change state due to an exogenous influence in which case its observed cause may not change state at the same time. People used this strategy to learn the direction of causal relations and a wide variety of causal structures (Experiments 4-6). Finally, considering exogenous influences responsible for the observed changes facilitates learning causal directionality (Experiment 7). Temporal reasoning may be the norm rather than the exception for causal learning and may reflect the way most events are experienced naturalistically.     

Acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal functions in music

The acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal stabilities in music is investigated in children of elementary school age. Listeners judge how good short tone sequences sound as melodies. The ratings show a pattern of increasing differentiation of the pitches in an octave range. The youngest listeners distinguish between scale and nonscale tones; older listeners distinguish between the tonic triad tones and other scale components. A group of adult listeners show octave equivalence and temporal asymmetries, with a preference for sequences ending on the more stable tones within the hierarchy. Pitch height effects do not interact with the age of the listener. These results are discussed in terms of the primacy of physical variables, novice-expert differences, and general cognitive principles governing the acquisition and development of internal representations of pitch relationships.     

Degradation of validity over time: a test and extension of Ackerman's model

The dynamic nature of the predictor-criterion relationship has long been a concern in psychology, especially with regard to the deterioration of validity over time. The authors examine P. L. Ackerman's ( 1987, 1988) hypothesized relationships between different types of predictors and criteria over time using data from previous longitudinal studies. Expert ratings categorized predictors and criteria according to P. L. Ackerman's model. Regression results support the predicted negative curvilinear relationship between cognitive ability and consistent and inconsistent task performance but do not support the predicted relationships between perceptual speed ability and psychomotor ability and consistent and inconsistent task performance. Deterioration of validity was more ubiquitous than has been suggested previously, and the pervasive form of deterioration was cubic with a negative trend. Findings are discussed in the context of catastrophe-chaos models.