因果信息在贝叶斯推理中的作用:问题情境的调节

以大学生为被试,考察因果信息在不同贝叶斯推理问题中的作用。结果表明:(1)问题情境的主效应显著(F(1,122)=16.33,p0.05,η~2=0.120),因果信息的主效应不显著((F(1,122)=1.161,p=0.283,η~2=0.01),但问题类型和因果信息的交互作用显著(F(1,122)=4.757,p0.05,η~2=0.038)。(2)不同类型的问题上因果信息的作用是不同的。具体表现为,在乳癌问题中,增加了因果信息,被试的正确率明显提高(χ~2(1)=6.759,p0.05,V=0.607),而在中彩问题中没有因果信息的推理成绩反而更好(χ~2(1)=1.864,p=0.221,V=0.167)。     

Psychics,aliens, or experience? Using the Anomalistic Belief Scale to examine the relationship between type of belief and probabilistic reasoning

A growing body of research has shown people who hold anomalistic (e.g., paranormal) beliefs may differ from nonbelievers in their propensity to make probabilistic reasoning errors. The current study explored the relationship between these beliefs and performance through the development of a new measure of anomalistic belief, called the Anomalistic Belief Scale (ABS). One key feature of the ABS is that it includes a balance of both experiential and theoretical belief items. Another aim of the study was to use the ABS to investigate the relationship between belief and probabilistic reasoning errors on conjunction fallacy tasks. As expected, results showed there was a relationship between anomalistic belief and propensity to commit the conjunction fallacy. Importantly, regression analyses on the factors that make up the ABS showed that the relationship between anomalistic belief and probabilistic reasoning occurred only for beliefs about having experienced anomalistic phenomena, and not for theoretical anomalistic beliefs.     

The influence of relational complexity and strategy selection on children's reasoning in the Latin Square Task

The present study focused on children's deductive reasoning when performing the Latin Square Task, an experimental task designed to explore the influence of relational complexity. Building on Birney, Halford, and Andrew's (2006) research, we created a version of the task that minimized nonrelational factors and introduced new categories of items. The results of two experiments conducted with school-aged children yielded an apparent dilution of complexity effects and suggest that specific inferential strategies can reduce the relational complexity that children need to process. A theoretical account is proposed emphasizing the influence of adaptive selection of strategies that mediate processing capacity constraints in reasoning development.     

Levels of modality for BDI Logic

The use of rational agents for modelling real world problems has both been heavily investigated and become well accepted, with BDI (Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions) Logic being a widely used architecture to represent and reason about rational agency. However, in the real world, we often have to deal with different levels of confidence in the beliefs we hold, desires we have, and intentions that we commit to. This paper extends our previous framework that integrated qualitative levels of beliefs, desires, and intentions into BDI Logic. We describe an expanded set of axioms and properties of the extended logic. We present a modular structure for the semantics which involves a non-normal Kripke type semantics that may be used for other agent systems. Further, we demonstrate the usefulness of our framework with a scheduling task example.     

The mismeasure of morals: antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas

Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.     

When can we say 'if'?

In this study, we focus on the conditions which permit people to assert a conditional statement of the form 'if p then q' with conversational relevance. In a broadly decision-theoretic approach, also drawing on hypothetical thinking theory [Evans, J. St. B. T. (2007). Hypothetical thinking: Dual processes in reasoning and judgement. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.], we predicted that conditional tips and promises would appear more useful and persuasive and be more likely to encourage an action p when (a) the conditional link from p to q was stronger, (b) the cost of the action p was lower and (c) the benefit of the consequence q was higher. Similarly, we predicted that conditional warnings and threats would be seen as more useful and persuasive and more likely to discourage an action p when (a) the conditional link from p to q was stronger, (b) the benefit of the action p was lower and (c) the cost of the consequence q was higher. All predictions were strongly confirmed, suggesting that such conditionals may best be asserted when they are of high relevance to the goals of the listener.     

Differences in Fear of Isolation as an explanation of Cultural Differences: Evidence from memory and reasoning

Previous research suggests that members of East Asian cultures show a greater preference for dialectical thinking and sensitivity to context information than do Westerners. We suggest this difference is rooted in a greater chronic Fear of Isolation (FOI) in East Asians than in Westerners. To support this hypothesis, we manipulated FOI in a group of Westerners and assessed their relative preference for dialectical proverbs and sensitivity to context. For cross-cultural validation of our hypothesis, we assessed the relationship between chronic levels of FOI and dialectical reasoning in Koreans. Consistent with our proposal, both experimentally primed FOI (Experiment 1A and 2) and chronic levels of FOI (Experiment 1B) were positively related to relative preference for dialectical proverbs. This effect was independent of participants’ level of negative mood (Experiment 2). A third experiment showed that sensitivity to context was affected by FOI in a manner consistent with previous studies of cultural differences (Experiment 3).     

Rationality and reasoning with metaphors

Traditional accounts of rationality typically preclude metaphorical reasoning. We review research that has highlighted the pervasiveness of metaphors in creative problem solving, jurisprudence and history of science, and argue that any account of rationality must explicitly acknowledge the ontology of representation and include an ontology-changing mechanism. From these considerations, we present an interaction-based view of cognition and examine the problem of rationality in its terms. We argue that rationality is closely related to the attitude of a cognitive agent towards incoherency—by which we do not mean internal inconsistency but operational incongruity in the external world. We conclude that though rationality permits a change of ontology, it requires a healthy respect towards the autonomous structure of the environment.     

Enhancing adolescent girls’ argument skills in reasoning about personal and non-personal decisions

The present study sought to evaluate (a) the effectiveness of an intervention in developing adolescents’ argument skills regarding a decision on a topic of high potential personal relevance (teen pregnancy) or one of general social relevance (capital punishment), and (b) differential effects of the two topics in promoting the generalization of skills to a new topic. Thirty 14–15-year-old adolescent girls participated in an intervention on one of the two topics. The 16 sessions of the intervention were identical except for topic. Argument skills were assessed on both topics at pretest and posttest. Both interventions were effective in developing rudimentary argument skills, but only the intervention focusing on the personally relevant topic resulted in transfer to the less personal topic. Transfer in the opposite direction did not occur.     

How 7-month-olds interpret ambiguous motion events: Category-based reasoning in infancy

This paper investigates the role of static and dynamic attributes for the animate-inanimate distinction in category-based reasoning of 7-month-olds. Three experiments tested infants’ responses to movement events involving an unfamiliar animal and a ball. When either the animal or the ball showed self-initiated irregular movements (Experiment 1), infants expected the previously active object to start moving again. When both objects were moving together in an ambiguous motion event (Experiment 2), infants expected only the animal to start moving again. Initial looking preferences for each object did not influence results. When either the facial features of the animal were removed, or its furry body was replaced by a plastic spiral in an ambiguous motion event (Experiment 3), infants formed no clear expectation regarding future movements. Based on this set of findings we conclude that 7-month-olds flexibly combine information about the static and dynamic properties of objects in order to reason about motion events.