Leaping to Conclusions: Why Premise Relevance Affects Argument Strength

Everyday reasoning requires more evidence than raw data alone can provide. We explore the idea that people can go beyond this data by reasoning about how the data was sampled. This idea is investigated through an examination of premise non‐monotonicity, in which adding premises to a category‐based argument weakens rather than strengthens it. Relevance theories explain this phenomenon in terms of people's sensitivity to the relationships among premise items. We show that a Bayesian model of category‐based induction taking premise sampling assumptions and category similarity into account complements such theories and yields two important predictions: First, that sensitivity to premise relationships can be violated by inducing a weak sampling assumption; and second, that premise monotonicity should be restored as a result. We test these predictions with an experiment that manipulates people's assumptions in this regard, showing that people draw qualitatively different conclusions in each case.     

Is the study about spontaneous attention to exact quantity based on studies of spontaneous focusing on numerosity?

Li and Baroody present a study in which they investigate toddlers’ spontaneous attention to exact quantity without acknowledging how previous studies of spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) are related to their concept and methods. In this commentary requested by the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, we argue that the concept and the methods of spontaneous attention to exact quantity in the study of Li and Baroody clearly arise from previous research on SFON, as the authors have previously noted in their paper published in 2008. It is highly questionable whether their approach can be theoretically or methodologically dissociated from the previous research on SFON tendency to the extent that it is necessary to use an alternative name for the concept in their study.     

社会认知中归纳推论－演绎推论的不对称性现象

在社会知觉中,人们会较多的根据个体的行为表现推论其所具有的人格特质（归纳推论）,较少根据人格特质来推论个体的行为表现（演绎推论）,Maass将这一现象命名为归纳推论－演绎推论的不对称性,并在西方文化下验证了这一现象。刻板印象在这一不对称性现象中起着调节作用,行为信息与刻板印象是否一致影响了归纳推论,对与刻板印象一致的信息更易做出归纳推论,而对演绎推论没有影响。在不同的文化背景下,归纳推论－演绎推论的不对称性表现存在差异,东方文化下的个体对两种推论过程没有表现出明显的倾向性。本文介绍了这一现象的表现,并总结了产生这一社会现象的内在原因及相关的研究进展。     

Self-Doubt Effects Depend on Beliefs about Ability: Experimental Evidence

Past research has shown negative effects of chronic self-doubt on psychological and performance outcomes. Recent correlational evidence suggests that incremental beliefs about ability ameliorate certain self-doubt effects. The current research examines whether these correlational findings are robust when subjected to experimental testing. In Experiment 1, we manipulated beliefs about ability (incremental vs. entity) and demonstrated that changing beliefs about ability altered responses to self-doubt. For individuals primed with entity beliefs, higher self-doubt was associated with greater nervousness and poorer anagram performance; for individuals primed with incremental beliefs, self-doubt had no significant effects. Experiment 2 was a 2 (manipulated belief: incremental vs. entity) × 2 (self-doubt: doubt induction vs. control) factorial design. The result showed that self-doubt induction lowered self-esteem relative to control when people were primed with entity beliefs but did not affect self-esteem when incremental beliefs were primed. However, Experiment 1 results on affect and performance were not replicated in Experiment 2. Thus, although we provide some causal evidence that inducing individuals to adopt an ability-is-malleable mindset reduces the negative effects of self-doubt, further experimental work is required to study the moderating role of mindsets for self-doubt effects.     

Aversive functions of response effort: Fact or artifact?

Historically, effort has been viewed as aversive. Most supporting evidence comes from studies demonstrating increased force/effort requirements reduce operant responding. Changes in force/effort requirements, however, are often accompanied by changes in response definition when mechanical devices are used to define the response. As a consequence, responses measured at one point in a study may go unmeasured at other points. In an alternative approach, we used a continuous measurement strategy that provided a means to fix the threshold force defining the response class and simultaneously allowed independent manipulation of the force criteria required to produce reinforcement. Rats pressed a force transducer according to a fixed‐ratio 5 schedule of food delivery. The criterion force was systematically increased and decreased; the threshold for response detection was constant. When response rates included only criterion responses, overall rate decreased when force requirements increased. By contrast, when all responses, both those meeting force criteria and those that did not (above the threshold but below the criteria for reinforcement) were included in the rate calculation, increases in force increased response rate. Increases in force criteria also increased the maximum force (g) and time‐integral of force (g‐s) of operant behavior. Control conditions showed increases in responding could be explained by the emergence of subcriterion responses, irrespective of force. We conclude that prior results showing effort decreases response rates are due to an artifact arising from inadvertent changes in response definitions. Increases in effort may better be understood as changes in the response:reinforcer payoff owing to the emergence of a subcriterion response class.     

Categories of Large Numbers in Line Estimation

How do people stretch their understanding of magnitude from the experiential range to the very large quantities and ranges important in science, geopolitics, and mathematics? This paper empirically evaluates how and whether people make use of numerical categories when estimating relative magnitudes of numbers across many orders of magnitude. We hypothesize that people use scale words—thousand, million, billion—to carve the large number line into categories, stretching linear responses across items within each category. If so, discontinuities in position and response time are expected near the boundaries between categories. In contrast to previous work (Landy, Silbert, & Goldin, 2013) that suggested only that a minority of college undergraduates employed categorical boundaries, we find that discontinuities near category boundaries occur in most or all participants, but that accurate and inaccurate participants respond in opposite ways to category boundaries. Accurate participants highlight contrasts within a category, whereas inaccurate participants adjust their responses toward category centers.     

词语型类别属性归纳中分类与属性推理过程的时间特征

先前的研究中没有清晰分离类别属性归纳任务中分类过程与属性推理过程的ERP特征。本研究采用了事件相关电位技术(ERPs), 通过在词语型类别属性归纳任务的结论呈现阶段分开呈现结论类别和结论属性, 探讨了类别属性归纳中分类过程和属性推理过程的ERP特征。实验结果显示：在结论类别呈现阶段, 结论无关类别比结论关联类别诱发了更大的N400, 表明N400与类别属性归纳中的语义分类过程密切相关。在结论属性呈现阶段, 无论是在类别关联还是在类别无关条件下, 不一致属性比一致属性均诱发了更大的前部N2成分, 反映了属性知觉上的失匹配或规则的违背。随后, 在300~400 ms的时间窗口发现, 一致属性比不一致属性在前部脑区诱发了更大的类似于P3a的正偏转, 反映了对一致属性的更多关注。同时, 实验还发现, 当结论类别与前提类别关联时, 在300~400 ms的时间窗口, 一致属性比不一致属性在后部脑区也诱发了更大的类似于P3b的正偏转, 反映了推理预期的满意程度; 随后, 在400~600 ms的时间窗口, 不一致属性比一致属性在后部脑区诱发了更大的正偏转, 这与推理规则的违反相关。     

Explaining after by before: Basic aspects of a dynamic systems approach to the study of development

The basic properties of a dynamic systems approach of development are illustrated by contrasting two simple equations. One, y_t+1 = f (y_t), is characteristic of dynamic systems models. The other, y_i = f (x_i), refers to what, for the sake of simplicity, is referred to as the standard developmental approach. We give illustrations from cognitive, language and social development to show the characteristic differences of these two types of models and show their complementarity. The article further compares the “Bloomington” with the “Groningen” approach to dynamic systems theorizing in developmental psychology. It continues with a discussion of two important questions. One involves the issue of measurement and the nature of developmental variables from the viewpoint of dynamic systems. The second concerns the question of short- and long-term time scales in developmental models, which is discussed on the basis of an example, namely dyadic interaction of young children in the context of different social statuses.     

Individual differences in children's mathematical competence are related to the intentional but not automatic processing of Arabic numerals

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the role played by basic numerical magnitude processing in the typical and atypical development of mathematical skills. In this context, tasks measuring both the intentional and automatic processing of numerical magnitude have been employed to characterize how children’s representation and processing of numerical magnitude changes over developmental time. To date, however, there has been little effort to differentiate between different measures of ‘number sense’. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between automatic and intentional measures of magnitude processing as well as their relationships to individual differences in children’s mathematical achievement. A group of 119 children in 1st and 2nd grade were tested on the physical size congruity paradigm (automatic processing) as well as the number comparison paradigm to measure the ratio effect (intentional processing). The results reveal that measures of intentional and automatic processing are uncorrelated with one another, suggesting that these tasks tap into different levels of numerical magnitude processing in children. Furthermore, while children’s performance on the number comparison paradigm was found to correlate with their mathematical achievement scores, no such correlations could be obtained for any of the measures typically derived from the physical size congruity task. These findings therefore suggest that different tasks measuring ‘number sense’ tap into different levels of numerical magnitude representation that may be unrelated to one another and have differential predictive power for individual differences in mathematical achievement.     

Squeezing, striking, and vocalizing: Is number representation fundamentally spatial?

Numbers are fundamental entities in mathematics, but their cognitive bases are unclear. Abundant research points to linear space as a natural grounding for number representation. But, is number representation fundamentally spatial? We disentangle number representation from standard number-to-line reporting methods, and compare numerical estimations in educated participants using line-reporting with three nonspatial reporting conditions (squeezing, bell-striking, and vocalizing). All three cases of nonspatial-reporting consistently reproduced well-established results obtained with number-line methods. Furthermore, unlike line-reporting—and congruent with the psychophysical Weber–Fechner law—nonspatial reporting systematically produced logarithmic mappings for all nonsymbolic stimuli. Strikingly, linear mappings were obtained exclusively in conditions with culturally mediated elements (e.g., words). These results suggest that number representation is not fundamentally spatial, but builds on a deeper magnitude sense that manifests spatially and nonspatially mediated by magnitude, stimulus modality, and reporting condition. Number-to-space mappings—although ubiquitous in the modern world—do not seem to be rooted directly in brain evolution but have been culturally privileged and enhanced.