Adaptive changes between cue abstraction and exemplar memory in a multiple-cue judgment task with continuous cues

The majority of previous studies on multiple-cue judgment with continuous cues have involved comparisons between judgments and multiple linear regression models that integrated cues into a judgment. The authors present an experiment indicating that in a judgment task withadditive combination of multiple continuous cues, people indeed displayed abstract knowledge of the cue criterion relations that was mentally integrated into a judgment, but in a task withmultiplicative combination of continuous cues, people instead relied on retrieval of memory traces of similar judgment cases (exemplars). These results suggest that people may adopt qualitatively distinct forms of knowledge, depending on the structure of a multiple-cue judgment task. The authors discuss implications for theories of multiple-cue judgment.     

Development and Validation of the Personal Values Dictionary: A Theory-Driven Tool for Investigating References to Basic Human Values in Text

Estimating psychological constructs from natural language has the potential to expand the reach and applicability of personality science. Research on the Big Five has produced methods to reliably assess personality traits from text, but the development of comparable tools for personal values is still in the early stages. Based on the Schwartz theory of basic human values, we developed a dictionary for the automatic assessment of references to personal values in text. To refine and validate the dictionary, we used Facebook updates, blog posts, essays, and book chapters authored by over 180 000 individuals. The results show high reliability for the dictionary and a pattern of correlations between the value types in line with the circumplex structure. We found small to moderate (r_s = .1–.4) but consistent correlations between dictionary scores and self-reported scores for 7 out of 10 values. Correlations between the dictionary scores and age, gender, and political orientation of the author and scores for other established dictionaries mostly followed theoretical predictions. The Personal Values Dictionary can be used to assess references to value orientations in textual data, such as tweets, blog posts, or status updates, and will stimulate further research in methods to assess human basic values from text.     

Early drinking onset: A study of prevalence and determinants among 13‐year‐old adolescents in Norway

Early drinking onset is associated with different psychosocial adjustment problems among adolescents. The aim of this study was to assess determinants associated with early drinking and to identify factors predicting early drinking onset among adolescents. The study included 1,550 eighth‐graders with a mean age of 13.5 years from 41 schools. A total of 24% (boys 29%, girls 19%) had ever drunk alcohol, while 14% had drunk some alcohol in the last 30 days. Further, early drinking was associated with gender, religion, school performance, smoking and bullying in the bivariate tests. Predictors of early drinking onset were identified by generalized linear mixed models with two multivariable models created. The first model included social and environmental variables. Entering intentions, expectancies, attitudes and norms into the multivariable analysis resulted in a significant improvement of the model fit constituting 86% in the second model. The percentage correctly classified those (56%) who had been drinking in the second model which was two times higher compared to the first model. Gender, religion and smoking emerged as significant predictors of drinking in both models.     

Cur deus caro: Jesus and the Cosmos Story

Abstract

There seems to be a vast gulf between the grand-scale story of the world of creation, cosmic in scope and pitiless in its operations, and the small-scale story of Jesus as embodying divine empathy. The concept of deep incarnation offers a bridge by arguing that God's own Logos or Wisdom, when assuming the particular life story of Jesus, also conjoins the material conditions of God's world of creation at large (“all flesh”), shares the fate of all biological life forms (“grass and lilies”), and experiences the pains of all sentient creatures (“sparrows and foxes”). Incarnation is thus the story of God's reach into the very tissue of material and biological existence. In the embodied Logos, the “flesh” of Jesus Christ is co-extensive with his divinity. Otherwise, the incarnation would be skin deep, confined to a historical figure of the past, or merely an external appendix to divine life.     

The corona crisis unmasks prevailing social ideologies

This essay contrasts two visions of selfhood: the buffered, autonomous self, and the flexible, resonant self. The autonomous self, while robustly assertive and active, seeks to insulate itself from threats, thereby robbing it of vital connections to other selves and to nature. The resonant self, in contrast, risks more by standing in fluid relationships of resonance and dissonance with its social and natural environments. While the two stand in tension, a baptismal theology entails both elements of a sheltered self and a resonant self that remains flexible and responsive to the ups and downs of human experience. Conversely, even a secular-minded person will have access to important zones of resonance.     

Note on the rationality of rule-based versus exemplar-based processing in human judgment

This paper reports a study of the relationship between rule- versus exemplar-based processing and criteria for rationality of judgment. Participants made probability judgments in a classification task devised by S. W. Allen and L. R. Brooks (1991). In the exemplar condition, the miscalibration was accounted for by stochastic components of the judgment with a format-dependence effect, implying simultaneous over- and underconfidence depending on the response scale. In the rule condition, there was an overconfidence bias not accounted for by the stochastic components of judgment. In both conditions the participants were additive on average and reasonably transitive, but the larger stochastic component in the exemplar condition produced somewhat larger absolute deviations. The results suggest that exemplar processes are unbiased but more perturbed by stochastic components, while rule-based processes may be more prone to bias.     

Exemplars, prototypes, and the flexibility of classification models

J. P. Minda and J. D. Smith (2001) showed that a prototype model outperforms an exemplar model, especially in larger categories or categories that contained more complex stimuli. R. M. Nosofsky and S. R. Zaki (2002) showed that an exemplar model with a response-scaling mechanism outperforms a prototype model. The authors of the current study investigated whether excessive model flexibility could explain these results. Using cross-validation, the authors demonstrated that both the prototype model and the exemplar model with a response-scaling mechanism suffered from overfilling in the linearly separable category structure. The results illustrate the need to make sure that the best-fitting model is not chasing error variance instead of variance attributed to the cognitive process it is supposed to model.     

Exemplar effects in categorization and multiple-cue judgment

Categorization and multiple-cue judgment are similar tasks, but the influential models in the two areas are different in terms of the computations, processes, and neural substrates that they imply. In categorization, exemplar memory is often emphasized, whereas multiple-cue judgment generally is interpreted in terms of integration of cues that have been abstracted in training. In 3 experiments the authors investigated whether these conclusions derive from genuine differences in the processes or are accidental to the different research methods. The results revealed large individual differences and a shift from exemplar memory to cue abstraction when the criterion is changed from a binary to a continuous variable, especially for a probabilistic criterion. People appear to switch between qualitatively distinct processes in the 2 tasks.