资源困境中共同收益延迟的影响：时间折扣的调节效应

通过测量83名大学生的时间折扣率和不同共同收益延迟时距上的金币拿取量,以探讨资源困境中共同收益延迟对个体决策的影响及时间折扣的调节效应。结果表明：（1）金币拿取量随共同收益延迟时距的增长而增加,增加趋势和初始时间点的金币拿取量均存在显著的个体差异;（2）时间折扣率反向调节初始延迟时间点的金币拿取量,正向调节金币拿取量随延迟时距增长而增加的速率。这表明资源困境与跨期选择两个不同研究领域具有紧密联系,对当前资源保护制度的制定与实施具有一定的启发意义。     

Productive conflict in group decision making: genuine and contrived dissent as strategies to counteract biased information seeking

Decision-making groups in organizations are often expected to function as a “think tank” and to perform “reality testing” to detect the best alternative. A biased search for information supporting the group's favored alternative impairs a group's ability to fulfill these requirements. In a two-factorial experiment with 201 employees and managers from various economic and public organizations, genuine and contrived dissent were investigated as counterstrategies to biased information seeking. Genuine dissent was manipulated by forming three-person groups whose members either all favored the same alternative individually (homogeneous groups) or consisted of a minority and a majority faction with regard to their favored alternative (heterogeneous groups). Contrived dissent was varied by the use or nonuse of the “devil's advocacy” technique. The results demonstrate that heterogeneity was more effective in preventing a confirmatory information-seeking bias than devil's advocacy was. Confidence was identified as an important mediator. Implications for the design of interventions aimed at facilitating reality testing in group decision making are discussed.     

Aging and decision‐making competence: an analysis of comprehension and consistency skills in older versus younger adults considering health‐plan options

Older adults need to maintain strong decision‐making capabilities as they age. However, we know little about how age‐related physical and psychological changes affect older adults' judgment and decision processes. This paper reports the results of research comparing older versus younger adults' performance on evaluation and choice tasks about health‐plan options. In particular, comprehension and consistency in judgments (across separate versus joint evaluation contexts) were examined. Results indicated that increasing age was related to greater comprehension errors and inconsistent preferences, even when covariates (education, income, gender, self‐perceived skill and health, decision style, and attitude toward delegation) were taken into account. Discussion of the results emphasizes difficulties in interpreting the meaning of age differences in performance on decision tasks and the need for research that ascertains the seriousness of the consequences of age differences in real‐life tasks. The implications for providing decision‐aiding interventions for older adults are highlighted. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bigger is better: the influence of physical size on aesthetic preference judgments

The hypothesis that the physical size of an object can influence aesthetic preferences was investigated. In a series of four experiments, participants were presented with pairs of abstract stimuli and asked to indicate which member of each pair they preferred. A preference for larger stimuli was found on the majority of trials using various types of stimuli, stimuli of various sizes, and with both adult and 3‐year‐old participants. This preference pattern was disrupted only when participants had both stimuli that provided a readily accessible alternative source of preference‐evoking information and sufficient attentional resources to make their preference judgments. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一个新的测量过程框架——对引入认知加工模型的再思考

从认知任务分析出发的测验设计,核心在于从认知加工的角度对项目底层作答机制作出解释。其中,能够刻画任务难度的模型最有可能与心理计量模型相结合。因而,具备成熟难度法则的各种小型理论或通用理论可以进入测量过程,实现从纯粹误差结构控制的测量到内容导引的测量的转变。在这样一个框架之下,理论对任务上作答过程的理解是否恰当,刺激特性变量与任务难度关系的揭示(即难度法则)是否准确,可以在测量的过程中进行证伪。项目反应理论还未及很好回答的效度问题,可望在这一拓展的框架中获得圆满解决。本文为新的测量过程框架提供了一个示意图。     

What do graded effects of semantic transparency reveal about morphological processing?

We examined the influence of semantic transparency on morphological facilitation in English in three lexical decision experiments. Decision latencies to visual targets (e.g., CASUALNESS) were faster after semantically transparent (e.g., CASUALLY) than semantically opaque (e.g., CASUALTY) primes whether primes were auditory and presented immediately before onset of the target (Experiment 1a) or visual with an stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 250 ms (Experiment 1b). Latencies did not differ at an SOA of 48 ms (Experiment 2) or with a forward mask at an SOA of 83 ms (Experiment 3). Generally, effects of semantic transparency among morphological relatives were evident at long but not at short SOAs with visual targets, regardless of prime modality. Moreover, the difference in facilitation after opaque and transparent primes was graded and increased with family size of the base morpheme.     

Professional Autonomy in Belgium

The Belgian health care system has a few features that may havecontributed to the rising costs of health care: patients' freechoice of physicians, large clinical freedom of physicians, essentiallya fee-for-service remuneration for medical specialists in which the feesare agreed between insurance funds and physicians. The increased medicalconsumption and costs have prompted the state and insurance companies totake measures that limit the professional autonomy of the physicians.Access to medical education, free until 1997, is now restricted. Themedical profession is organized in the Order of Physicians that hasestablished a code of professional ethics that has moral but not legalforce. So far, there is no special legislation for thepatient–physician relationship, though laws on specific issueslike organ transplantation contain duties for physicians. In recentyears a debate is taking place on patients' rights, of which informedconsent is central and gaining importance in medico-legal publications.An analysis of (ethical and legal) regulations concerning thewithholding or withdrawal of treatment by physicians demonstrate thatthe profession still enjoys a large clinical autonomy, though duediscussion with the patient has become more explicitly required. Therespect for professional autonomy is not primarily due to any formalpower that the Order of Physicians would have, but is rather grounded inthe generally high quality of the patient–physician relationshipthat in ethical terms is considered essentially as a confidencerelationship rather than a contractual relationship.     

Using Brunswikian theory and a longitudinal design to study how hierarchical teams adapt to increasing levels of time pressure

Brunswikian theory and a longitudinal design were used to study how three-person, hierarchical teams adapted to increasing levels of time pressure and, thereby, try to understand why previous team research has not necessarily found a direct relationship between team processes and performance with increasing time pressure. We obtained four principal findings. First, team members initially adapted to increasing time pressure without showing any performance decrements by accelerating their cognitive processing, increasing the amount of their implicit coordination by sending more information without being asked and, to a lesser extent, filtering (omitting) certain activities. Second, teams began and continued to perform the task differently with increasing time pressure, yet often achieved comparable levels of performance. Third, time pressure did affect performance because there was a level of time pressure beyond which performance could not be maintained, although that level differed for different teams. And, fourth, some adaptation strategies were more effective than others at the highest time pressure level. Taken together, these findings support the Brunswikian perspective that one should not necessarily expect a direct relationship between team processes and performance with increasing time pressure because teams adapt their processes in different, yet often equally effective ways, in an effort to maintain high and stable performance.     

Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words

Three experiments examined the involvement of newly learnt words in lexical competition. Adult participants were familiarized with novel nonsense sequences that overlapped strongly with existing words (e.g. cathedruke, derived from cathedral) through repeated presentation in a phoneme-monitoring task. Experiment 1 looked at the immediate effects of exposure to these sequences, with participants showing familiarity with the form of the novel sequences in a two-alternative forced choice task. The effect of this exposure on lexical competition was examined by presenting the existing words (e.g. cathedral) in a lexical decision task. The immediate effect of the exposure was facilitatory, suggesting that the novel words had activated the representation of the closest real word rather than developing their own lexical representations. In Experiment 2, inhibitory lexical competition effects emerged over the course of 5 days for offset-diverging (e.g. cathedruke-cathedral) but not onset-diverging (e.g. yothedral-cathedral) novel words. Experiment 3 disentangled the roles of time and level-of-exposure in the lexicalization process and assessed the generality of the observed lexical inhibition using pause detection. A single, concentrated exposure session was used, which resulted in good recognition performance soon after. Lexicalization effects were absent immediately after exposure but emerged 1 week later, despite no intervening exposure to the novel items. These results suggest that integrating a novel word into the mental lexicon can be an extended process: phonological information is learnt swiftly, but full integration with existing items develops at a slower rate.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in visual word recognition: evidence from expert vocabularies

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists and chemists showed an advantage in lexical decision for late-acquired/high-frequency words (e.g. a psychologist responding to cognition) over late-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. a chemist responding to cognition), revealing a frequency effect when words are perfectly matched. However, contrary to theories that exclude AoA as a factor, performance was similar for the late-acquired/high-frequency and early-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. dragon) even though their cumulative frequencies differed by more than an order of magnitude. This last finding was replicated with geologists using geology words matched with early-acquired words in terms of concreteness (Experiment 2). Most interestingly, Experiment 3 yielded the same pattern of results in naming while controlling for imageability, a finding that is particularly problematic for parallel distributed processing models of reading.