Reinforcer pathology II: Reward magnitude,reward delay,and demand for alcohol collectively relate to college students' alcohol related problems

The reinforcer pathologies model of addiction posits that two characteristic patterns of operant behavior characterize addiction. Specifically, individuals suffering from addiction have elevated levels of behavioral economic demand for their substances of abuse and have an elevated tendency to devalue delayed rewards (reflected in high delay discounting rates). Prior research has demonstrated that these behavioral economic markers are significant predictors of many of college students' alcohol-related problems. Delay discounting, however, is a complex behavioral performance likely undergirded by multiple behavioral processes. Emerging analytical approaches have isolated the role of participants' sensitivity to changes in reinforcer magnitude and changes in reinforcer delay. The current study uses these analytic approaches to compare participants' discounting of money versus alcohol, and to build regression models that leverage these new insights to predict a wider range of college students' alcohol related problems. Using these techniques, we were able to 1) demonstrate that individuals differed in their sensitivity to magnitudes of alcohol versus money, but not sensitivity to delays to those commodities and 2) that we could use our behavioral economic measures to predict a range of students' alcohol related problems.     

Do people treat missing information adaptively when making inferences?

When making inferences, people are often confronted with situations with incomplete information. Previous research has led to a mixed picture about how people react to missing information. Options include ignoring missing information, treating it as either positive or negative, using the average of past observations for replacement, or using the most frequent observation of the available information as a placeholder. The accuracy of these inference mechanisms depends on characteristics of the environment. When missing information is uniformly distributed, it is most accurate to treat it as the average, whereas when it is negatively correlated with the criterion to be judged, treating missing information as if it were negative is most accurate. Whether people treat missing information adaptively according to the environment was tested in two studies. The results show that participants were sensitive to how missing information was distributed in an environment and most frequently selected the mechanism that was most adaptive. From these results the authors conclude that reacting to missing information in different ways is an adaptive response to environmental characteristics.     

Building blocks of self-control: increased tolerance for delay with bundled rewards

Impulsive choice can be defined as temporary preference for a smaller-sooner reward (SS) over a larger-later reward (LL). Hyperbolic discounting implies that impulsive choices will occur less when organisms choose between a series of SSs versus LLs all at once than when they choose between single SS versus LL pairs. Eight rats were exposed to two conditions of an intertemporal choice paradigm using sucrose solution as reward. In both conditions, the LL was 150 microl delayed by 3 s, while the SS was an immediate reward that ranged from 25-150 microl across sessions. Preference for the LL was greater when the chosen reward was automatically delivered three times in succession (bundled) than when it was chosen singly and delivered after each choice. For each of the 8 rats, the estimated SS amount that produced indifference was higher in the bundled condition than in the single condition. Because bundling in humans may be based on the perception that one's current choice is predictive of future choices, the data presented here may demonstrate an important building block of self-control.     

Hyperbolic modeling and assessment of hypothetical health behaviors during a viral outbreak using crowdsourced samples

The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to investigate factors related to public response to public health measures, which could help better prepare implementation of similar measures for inevitable future pandemics. To understand individual and environmental factors that influence likelihood in engaging in personal and public health measures, three crowdsourced convenience samples from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) completed likelihood-discounting tasks of engaging in health behaviors given a variety of hypothetical viral outbreak scenarios. Experiment 1 assessed likelihood of mask wearing for a novel virus. Experiment 2 assessed vaccination likelihood based on efficacy and cost. Experiment 3 assessed likelihood of seeking health care based on number of symptoms and cost of treatment. Volume-based measures and three-dimensional modeling were used to analyze hypothetical decision making. Hypothetical public and personal health participation increased as viral fatality increased and generally followed a hyperbolic function. Public health participation was moderated by political orientation and trust in science, whereas treatment-seeking was only moderated by income. Analytic methods used in this cross-sectional study predicted population-level outcomes that occurred later in the pandemic and can be extended to various health behaviors.     

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.     

Sources and influence of perceptual variance: Comment on Dzhafarov's Regular Minimality Principle

Dzhafarov [(2002). Multidimensional Fechnerian scaling: Pairwise comparisons, regular minimality, and nonconstant self-similarity. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 46, 583-608] claims that Regular Minimality (RM) is a fundamental property of “same-different” discrimination probabilities and supports his claim with some empirical evidence. The key feature of RM is that the mapping, h, between two observation areas based on minimum discrimination probability is invertible. Dzhafarov [(2003a). Thurstonian-type representations for “same-different” discriminations: Deterministic decisions and independent images. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 47, 184-204; (2003b). Thurstonian-type representations for “same-different” discriminations: Probabilistic decisions and interdependent images. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 47, 229-243] also demonstrates that well-behaved Thurstonian models of “same-different” judgments are incompatible with RM and Nonconstant Self-Similarity (NCSS). There is extensive empirical support for the latter. Stimulus and neural sources of perceptual noise are discussed and two points are made:

Point 1: Models that require discrimination probabilities for noisy stimuli to possess the property that h is invertible would be too restrictive.

Point 2: In the absence of stimulus noise, violations of RM may be so subtle that their detection would be unlikely.

     

Chances and frequencies in probabilistic reasoning: rejoinder to Hoffrage,Gigerenzer, Krauss,and Martignon

Do individuals unfamiliar with probability and statistics need a specific type of data in order to draw correct inferences about uncertain events? Girotto and Gonzalez (Cognition 78 (2001) 247) showed that naive individuals solve frequency as well as probability problems, when they reason extensionally, in particular when probabilities are represented by numbers of chances. Hoffrage, Gigerenzer, Krauss, and Martignon (Cognition 84 (2002) 343) argued that numbers of chances are natural frequencies disguised as probabilities, though lacking the properties of true probabilities. They concluded that we failed to demonstrate that naive individuals can deal with true probabilities as opposed to natural frequencies. In this paper, we demonstrate that numbers of chances do represent probabilities, and that naive individuals do not confuse numbers of chances with frequencies. We conclude that there is no evidence for the claim that natural frequencies have a special cognitive status, and the evolutionary argument that the human mind is unable to deal with probabilities.     

Nonmonotonic conditionals that behave like conditional probabilities above a threshold

I'll describe a range of systems for nonmonotonic conditionals that behave like conditional probabilities above a threshold. The rules that govern each system are probabilistically sound in that each rule holds when the conditionals are interpreted as conditional probabilities above a threshold level specific to that system. The well-known preferential and rational consequence relations turn out to be special cases in which the threshold level is 1. I'll describe systems that employ weaker rules appropriate to thresholds lower than 1, and compare them to these two standard systems.