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.     

How Well Do We Know Our Inner Daredevil? Probing the Relationship Between Self‐Report and Behavioral Measures of Risk Taking

To measure a person's risk‐taking tendency, research has relied interchangeably on self‐report scales (e.g., “Indicate your likelihood of engaging in the risky behavior”) and more direct measures, such as behavioral tasks (e.g., “Do you accept or reject the risky option?”). It is currently unclear, however, how the two approaches map upon each other. We examined the relationship between self‐report likelihood ratings for risky choice in a monetary gamble task and actual choice, and tested how the relationship is affected by task ambiguity (i.e., when part of the information about risks and benefits is missing) and age. Five hundred participants (aged 19–85 years) were presented with 27 gambles, either in an unambiguous or an ambiguous condition. In a likelihood rating task, participants rated for each gamble the likelihood that they would accept it. In a separate choice task, they were asked to either accept or reject each gamble. Analyses using a signal‐detection approach showed that people's likelihood ratings discriminated between accept and reject cases in their choices rather well. However, task ambiguity weakened the association between likelihood ratings and choice. Further, older adults' likelihood ratings anticipated their choices more poorly than younger adults'. We discuss implications of these findings for existing approaches to the study of risk‐taking propensity, which have often relied on self‐reported risk tendency for ambiguous activities. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Should you Sleep on it? The Effects of Overnight Sleep on Subjective Preference‐based Choice

Conventional wisdom and studies of unconscious processing suggest that sleeping on a choice may improve decision making. Although sleep has been shown to benefit several cognitive tasks, including problem solving, its impact on everyday choices remains unclear. Here we explore the effects of ‘sleeping on it’ on preference‐based decisions among multiple options. In two studies, individuals viewed several attributes describing a set of items and were asked to select their preferred item after a 12‐hour interval that either contained sleep or was spent fully awake. After an overnight period including sleep, individuals showed increases in positive perceptions of the choice set. This finding contrasts with previous research showing that sleep selectively enhances recall for negative information. In addition, this increase in positive recall did not translate into a greater desire to purchase their preferred item or into an overall benefit for choice satisfaction. Time‐of‐day controls were used to confirm that the observed effects could not be explained by circadian influences. Thus, we show that people may feel more positive about the choice options but not more confident about the choice after ‘sleeping on’ a subjective decision. We discuss how the valence of recalled choice set information may be important in understanding the effects of sleep on multi‐attribute decision making and suggest several avenues for future research. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Numeracy Predicts More Effortful and Elaborative Search Strategies in a Complex Risky Choice Context: A Process‐Tracing Approach

The goal of the current study was to explore information search and processing differences between individuals who are less and more numerate in an attempt to better understand the mechanisms that might differentiate the choices they make. We did so using a computerized process‐tracing system known as MouseTrace, which presented monetary gambles in an alternative × attribute matrix with outcome (dollar amount) and probability information as attributes. This information was initially occluded but could be revealed by clicking on the cell that contained the desired information. Beginning with nine gambles offering the chance of gaining or losing a specified amount, participants (N = 110) narrowed down the options (to three and then one) using an inclusion or exclusion strategy. Consistent with previous research, inclusion was a more effortful strategy, and individuals who were higher in numeracy were more likely to select prospects with the highest expected value. Process measures revealed these individuals expended more effort (i.e., attended to and sought out more information and processed it in greater depth) and exhibited more compensatory processing than those who were lower in numeracy, but this sometimes depended on whether one was asked to include or exclude. These results serve as further evidence that individuals with higher levels of numeracy often engage in more elaborative processing of the decision task, which tends to lead to more optimal choices. However, they also suggest that individuals are adaptive and that the specific situation can matter. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What did Popper learn from Lakatos?

The canonical version of the history of twentieth century philosophy of science tells us that Lakatos was Popper’s disciple, but it is rarely mentioned that Popper would have learned anything from Lakatos. The aim of this paper is to examine Lakatos’ influence on Popper’s philosophical system and to argue that Lakatos did have an important, yet somewhat unexpected, impact on Popper’s thinking: he influenced Popper’s evolutionary model for ‘progress’ in science. And Lakatos’ influence sheds new light on why and how Popper continually revised one of the central claims of his philosophy of science: the evolutionary account of scientific theory change.     

声调在汉语音节感知中的作用

探讨超音段(如声调)与音段信息的共同作用机制, 对口语词汇识别研究具有重要的理论意义。有研究探讨了声调在口语词汇语义通达阶段的作用, 但在相对早期的音节感知阶段, 声调与声母、韵母的共同作用机制还缺乏系统的认识。本研究采用oddball实验范式, 通过两个行为实验考察了声调在汉语音节感知中的作用。实验1发现检测声调和声母变化的时间没有差异, 均比检测韵母变化的时间长, 表明在汉语音节感知中对声调的敏感性不及韵母。实验2发现声母和韵母的组合并没有明显优于对韵母的觉察, 但声调与声母或韵母的同时变化都促进了被试对偏差刺激的觉察, 表明声调通过与声母、韵母的结合来共同影响汉语音节的感知加工。研究结果在认知行为层面为声调在音节感知中的作用机制提供了直接的实验证据, 为进一步探讨超音段与音段信息共同作用的认知神经机制提供了基础。     

组织变革前非正式信息的作用机制

非正式信息是变革前信息沟通的重要组成部分, 对变革决策和执行有潜在的影响。围绕组织变革前非正式信息开展以下研究：(1)探究组织变革前非正式信息的内涵和结构; (2)基于心理因应和认知重构机制, 探索员工获取非正式信息之后, 其变革认知和情感的动态调整过程; (3)研究潜在的组织变革决策→非正式信息反馈→再决策过程, 即变革领导者通过获得员工变革认知和情感的反馈, 进行渐进决策优化的过程。研究结果能丰富变革沟通理论和指导我国变革实践。     

解释水平视角下的乐观偏差效应

研究基于解释水平理论,考查心理距离对乐观偏差效应的影响。实验从心理距离的事件概率维度、时间距离维度、空间距离维度入手,采用自编的材料对677名被试进行测量,探讨心理距离的远近对乐观偏差产生的影响。结果表明,被试对未来生活事件的判断存在总体上的乐观偏差。在较远的心理距离条件下,被试表现出更大的乐观偏差;而在较近的心理距离中,乐观偏差效应明显减小。但在时间距离维度以及消极事件的概率维度上,表现出与总体乐观偏差不一致的现象。