The influence of expertise and of physical complexity on visual short-term memory consolidation

This paper examines controversial claims about the merit of “unconscious thought” for making complex decisions. In four experiments, participants were presented with complex decisions and were asked to choose the best option immediately, after a period of conscious deliberation, or after a period of distraction (said to encourage “unconscious thought processes”). In all experiments the majority of participants chose the option predicted by their own subjective attribute weighting scores, regardless of the mode of thought employed. There was little evidence for the superiority of choices made “unconsciously”, but some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices. The final experiment suggested that the task is best conceptualized as one involving “online judgement” rather than one in which decisions are made after periods of deliberation or distraction. The results suggest that we should be cautious in accepting the advice to “stop thinking” about complex decisions.     

Improving time discrimination in children and adults in a temporal bisection task: The effects of feedback and no forced choice on decision and memory processes

In children aged 5 and 8 years old as well as in adults, Experiment 1 tested the effect of feedback on temporal performance using a bisection task. Experiment 2 added a no-forced-choice condition by giving the participants the possibility of responding “I don't know”. The results of Experiment 1 showed that providing feedback increased the bisection point value (point of subjective equality) in all age groups and increased sensitivity to time in the youngest children. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the proportion of “I don't know” responses peaked at the probe duration close to the arithmetic mean of the two anchor durations and decreased as the distance from this central value increased in both the adults and the 8-year-olds. In the 5-year-olds, the proportion of “I don't know” responses was lower and remained constant whatever the probe duration values. Unlike in the youngest children, giving the adults and the 8-year-olds the opportunity to respond “I don't know” increased their sensitivity to time. The modelling of our data suggests that providing feedback in a temporal bisection task affects both the memory and the decision processes. However, whereas the feedback-related effect had a similar effect on decision processes across the age groups, it had an opposite effect on memory processes in the 5-year-olds and the older participants, decreasing the variability of the memory representation of the anchor durations in the former while increasing it in the latter. Finally, in bisection, feedback only improved temporal performance when the memory for duration was imprecise as in the case of the children.     

Expertise and gambling: Using Type 2 signal detection theory to investigate differences between regular gamblers and nongamblers

This paper presents an experimental investigation into how individuals make decisions under uncertainty when faced with different payout structures in the context of gambling. Type 2 signal detection theory was utilized to compare sensitivity to bias manipulations between regular nonproblem gamblers and nongamblers in a novel probability-based gambling task. The results indicated that both regular gamblers and nongamblers responded to the changes of rewards for correct responses (Experiment 1) and penalties for errors (Experiment 2) in setting their gambling criteria, but that regular gamblers were more sensitive to these manipulations of bias. Regular gamblers also set gambling criteria that were more optimal. The results are discussed in terms of an expertise-transference hypothesis.     

Markedness effects in Norwegian–English bilinguals: Task-dependent use of language-specific letters and bigrams

This study investigates how bilinguals use sublexical language membership information to speed up their word recognition process in different task situations. Norwegian–English bilinguals performed a Norwegian–English language decision task, a mixed English lexical decision task, or a mixed Norwegian lexical decision task. The mixed lexical decision experiments included words from the nontarget language that required a “no” response. The language specificity of the Bokmål (a Norwegian written norm) and English (non)words was varied by including language-specific letters (“smør”, “hawk”) or bigrams (“dusj”, “veal”). Bilinguals were found to use both types of sublexical markedness to facilitate their decisions, language-specific letters leading to larger effects than language-specific bigrams. A cross-experimental comparison indicates that the use of sublexical language information was strategically dependent on the task at hand and that decisions were based on language membership information derived directly from sublexical (bigram) stimulus characteristics instead of indirectly via their lexical representations. Available models for bilingual word recognition fail to handle the observed marker effects, because all consider language membership as a lexical property only.     

Further attempts to clarify the importance of category variability for categorisation

The issue of how category variability affects classification of novel instances is an important one for assessing theories of categorisation, yet previous research cannot provide a compelling conclusion. In five experiments we reexamine some of the factors thought to affect participant performance. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants almost always classified the test item as belonging to the high variability category. By contrast, in Experiment 3 we employed an alternative experimental paradigm, where the difference in variability of the two categories was less salient. In that case, participants tended to classify a test item as belonging to the low variability category. Two additional experiments (4 and 5) explored in detail the differences between Experiments 1, 2 on the one hand, and 3 on the other. Some insight into the underlying psychological processes can be provided by computational models of categorisation, and we focus on the continuous version of Anderson's (1991) Rational Model, which has not been explored before in this context. The model predicts that test instances exactly halfway between the prototypes of two categories should be classified into the more variable category, consistent with the bulk of empirical findings. We also provided a comparison with a slightly reduced version of the Generalised Context Model (GCM) to show that its predictions are consistent with those from the Rational Model, for our stimulus sets.     

The leg-to-body ratio as a human aesthetic criterion

There are surprisingly few empirical studies on the aesthetic appeal of human legs, examining such variables as length or shape. The human legs are conspicuous in erotic contexts, but few studies have experimentally tested preferences for longer legs. This study examined the utility of the human leg-to-body ratio (LBR) as a specific aesthetic criterion among 71 British undergraduates. Participants rated for physical attractiveness line drawings that varied in five levels of LBR. The results showed that a longer LBR was preferred as maximally attractive in women, whereas a shorter LBR was preferred in men. Evolutionary psychological and socio-cultural explanations for this aesthetic preference are discussed, and the study's limitations are considered.     

高中会考等值方法的比较研究

本研究采用随机等组设计与铆测验相结合的方案。首先验证了两随机等组的平均数、方差和分布状态无显著差异,再用随机等组的等值分作为等值效标来检验其他等值方法的误差,然后比较了在铆测验设计中三种线性等值方法（在不同总体权重下）的误差值,以选出适合高中合考的等值方法及总体权重。经研究发现：会考等值宜采用Tucker观察分数线性等值方法,并宜选择总体权重W1＝1。     

Ratio versus difference comparators in choice.

Several theories in the learning literature describe decision rules for performance utilizing ratios and differences. The present paper analyzes rules for choice based on either delays to food, immediacies (the inverse of delays), or rates of food, combined factorially with a ratio or difference comparator. An experiment using the time-left procedure (Gibbon & Church, 1981) is reported with motivational differentials induced by unequal reinforcement durations. The preference results were compatible with a ratio-comparator decision rule, but not with decision rules based on differences. Differential reinforcement amounts were functionally equivalent to changes in delays to food. Under biased reinforcement, overall food rate was increased, but variance in preference was increased or decreased depending on which alternative was favored. This is a Weber law finding that is compatible with multiplicative, scalar sources of variance but incompatible with pacemaker rate changes proportional to food presentation rate.