Decision rules and signal detectability in a reinforcement-density discrimination

Two probabilistic schedules of reinforcement, one richer in reinforcement, the other leaner, were overlapping stimuli to be discriminated in a choice situation. One of two schedules was in effect for 12 seconds. Then, during a 6-second choice period, the first left-key peck was reinforced if the richer schedule had been in effect, and the first right-key peck was reinforced if the leaner schedule had been in effect. The two schedule stimuli may be viewed as two binomial distributions of the number of reinforcement opportunities. Each schedule yielded different frequencies of 16 substimuli. Each substimulus had a particular type of outcome pattern for the 12 seconds during which a schedule was in effect, and consisted of four consecutive light-cued 3-second T-cycles, each having 0 or 1 reinforced center-key pecks. Substimuli therefore contained 0 to 4 reinforcers. On any 3-second cycle, the first center-key peck darkened that key and was reinforced with probability .75 or .25 in the richer or leaner schedules, respectively. In terms of the theory of signal detection, detectability neared the maximum possible d′ for all four pigeons. Left-key peck probability increased when number of reinforcers in a substimulus increased, when these occurred closer to choice, or when pellets were larger for correct left-key pecks than for correct right-key pecks. Averaged over different temporal patterns of reinforcement in a substimulus, substimuli with the same number of reinforcers produced choice probabilities that matched relative expected payoff rather than maximized one alternative.     

The impact of using forced decision-making strategies on post-decisional confidence

The impact of motivational and cognitive factors on post-decisional confidence (PDC) level was tested in two experiments. In the first experiment, subjects were first identified as having an intuitive preference toward using either a compensatory or a noncompensatory decision strategy and later on were forced to use either a compatible or a non-compatible strategy. PDC level decreased after using a noncompensatory strategy, and the decrease was higher when it was a noncompatible strategy. In a second experiment, subjects received feedback about their preferred strategy but were not later forced to use any specific strategy. Most subjects continued to utilize their preferred strategy and PDC level was not changed. Overall, intuitive PDC was not found to be sensitive to differences between compensatory and noncompensatory strategies. The result suggested that PDC is a function of an internal cost-benefit analysis which includes both cognitive and motivational factors.     

规则变型推理对远迁移问题解决的促进

为了避免多重变异样例学习和采用题海战术,并能促进规则样例学习的远迁移问题解决,开创出原样例学习后对原型规则做出变型推理的学习方法,以算术应用题的解题样例为原样例学习材料进行了4项实验研究。结果显示：四年级小学生运用该方法可有效促进远迁移问题的解决;其变型推理能力存在数学成绩等级差异;提供问题情境和推理提示能提高部分学生规则变型推理成绩和远迁移测验成绩。实验结果证明,规则变型推理是促进远迁移问题解决的有效方法之一。     

Scientia Iuris - An Unsolved Philosophical Problem

Legal dogmatics in Continental European law (scientia iuris, Rechtswissenschaft) consists of professional legal writings whose task is to systematize and interpret valid law. Legal dogmatics pursues knowledge of the existing law, yet in many cases it leads to a change of the law. Among general theories of legal dogmatics, one may mention the theories of negligence, intent, adequate causation and ownership. The theories produce principles and they also produce defeasible rules. By means of production of general and defeasible theories, legal dogmatics aims at obtaining a system of law that is both internally coherent and harmonized with its background in morality and (political) philosophy. Legal dogmatics is necessary in the context of constitutional constraints on the majority rule. Only if the courts act on the basis of Reason they can be a legitimate counterpart of the majority rule. And Reason cannot be exhausted by particular decision making. It also needs a more abstract deliberation, given by expert jurists. However, legal dogmatics has been a target of several kinds of criticism: empirical, morally-political, epistemological, logical, and ontological. The position taken in this article is to answer such criticism by mutually adjusting philosophy and the practices of the law.     

Rank disagreement: A comparison of multi-criteria methodologies

A number of multi-criteria decision support techniques have emerged in recent years that use varying computational approaches to arrive at the most desirable solution and thereby ‘recommend’ a course of action. Decision makers who use the results of this analytic work should be assured that the computational schemes used by their supporting analysts or decision support software produce the appropriate solutions. We conducted a series of simulation experiments that compared the top-ranked options resulting from the computational algorithms that support Multi-Attribute Value Theory (MAVT) and three methods that are reported in the literature that allow rank reversals, the change in rank order of two options when an unrelated option is added or deleted from the analysis: the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Percentaging and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). We also included a Fuzzy algorithm proposed by Yager to gauge its consistency with the other algorithms, even though it is not subject to rank reversals. These experiments demonstrated that the MAVT and AHP techniques, when provided with the same decision outcome data, very often identify the same alternative as ‘best’. The other techniques are noticeably less consistent with MAVT, the Fuzzy algorithm being the least consistent. The situations under which the most frequent and significant differences occurred were dependent upon the method. The results of our experiments indicate that other issues (e.g. the processes used for problem structuring and the elicitation of value weights) are likely to be of greater significance to problem outcome (based on our experience) than the choice between the computational algorithms of MAVT and AHP. The results cause us to be concerned about the use of the other methods.     

The assistant referees’ activity in refereeing elite football: Preoccupations when not judging offside

ObjectiveThe purpose of this research was to study the preoccupations assistant referees had to participate in decision making about duels during football games.DesignResearch adopted a phenomenological framework to investigate the assistant referees’ lived experiences in order to understand their activity when they judged duels in match.MethodThis study investigated six professional football matches. Researchers conducted a participatory observation of the refereeing team before each match. Twelve self-confrontation interviews with each assistant referee of each match were conducted in order to make him/her describing his/her unfolding lived experience during the match.ResultsIn case of players’ duels, the perception of contextual cues enabled the assistants to appraise the occurring of a decision process with the central referee. For the assistants, the occurring of a decision process with the central referee meant his priority to intervene in the adjudication of duels, while the absence of decision process with the central referee meant for the assistants the possibility to intervene. The assistants adjusted their way of judging duels to how the central referee judged the previous ones.ConclusionsThe participation of assistants in decision making about duels depends on their preoccupations concerning the central referee’s priority. The way assistants perceive the central referee’s contextual judgment shapes the way they adjudicate duels. A latent intention to coordinate with the central referee, in relation with their collaborative tasks, is embedded in their preoccupations. Our results are a platform to develop further research about the referees’ collective activity.     

A one-boundary drift-diffusion model for time to collision estimation in a simple driving task

ABSTRACT

Driving is a complex everyday task. Every year a huge number of driving accidents around the world causes serious physical and mental injuries and deaths. The correct estimation of the remaining time to reach the other vehicles on the road, known as time to collision (TTC), is an important factor to avoid accidents. In this study, we aimed to use a drift-diffusion model (DDM) to better understand the participants’ estimation of TTC in two driving experiments. Both experiments were the same, except that in one of them participants were asked to finish the experiment as fast as they could, while in the other experiment there was no time constraint. DDM fitted the data from all participants well in both experiments according to the chi-square goodness of fit criterion. Also, results showed that time pressure increases subjects’ estimated TTC, the rate of accumulation of sensory information and the response threshold.     

Moral dilemmas and moral rules

Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contribution that rules make to reasoning about moral dilemmas. In two experiments, we find that participants show a parallel asymmetry about versions of the dilemmas that have minimized emotional force. In a third experiment, we find that people distinguish between whether an action violates a moral rule and whether it is, all things considered, wrong. We propose that judgments of whether an action is wrong, all things considered, implicate a complex set of psychological processes, including representations of rules, emotional responses, and assessments of costs and benefits.     

Decision by sampling

We present a theory of decision by sampling (DbS) in which, in contrast with traditional models, there are no underlying psychoeconomic scales. Instead, we assume that an attribute's subjective value is constructed from a series of binary, ordinal comparisons to a sample of attribute values drawn from memory and is its rank within the sample. We assume that the sample reflects both the immediate distribution of attribute values from the current decision's context and also the background, real-world distribution of attribute values. DbS accounts for concave utility functions; losses looming larger than gains; hyperbolic temporal discounting; and the overestimation of small probabilities and the underestimation of large probabilities.