| 1. |
- Millroth, Philip, et al.
(författare)
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Preference or Ability : Exploring the Relations between Risk Preference, Personality, and Cognitive Abilities
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0894-3257 .- 1099-0771. ; 33:4, s. 477-491
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Key issues in the behavioral sciences are if there exist stable risk preferences that generalize across domains and if these are best measured by revealed risk preference (RRP) in behavioral decision tasks or by surveys eliciting stated risk preference (SRP). We applied network analysis to data from a representative Swedish sample to investigate the relations between RRP, SRP, personality characteristics, and cognitive abilities, using in total over 70 measurements. The results showed that different measures of RRP were poorly intercorrelated and formed a community together with measures of numerical and cognitive abilities. Measures of SRP were weakly correlated with measures of RRP and identified in a distinctly separate community, along with personality characteristics and gender. The ensuing analyses provided support for a model suggesting that RRPs are contaminated by demands on numerical and cognitive abilities. RRPs may thus suffer from poor construct validity, whereas SRPs may better capture people's everyday risk preferences because they are related to more stable traits.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Henriksson, Maria P., et al.
(författare)
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What is Coded into Memory in the Absence of Outcome Feedback?
- 2010
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Ingår i: Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory and Cognition. - : American Psychological Association (APA). - 0278-7393 .- 1939-1285. ; 36:1, s. 1-16
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Although people often have to learn from environments with scarce and highly selective outcome feedback, the question of how non-feedback trials are represented in memory and affect later performance has received little attention in models of learning and decision making. In this article, the Generalized Context Model (R. M. Nosofsky, 1986) is used as a vehicle to test contrasting hypotheses about the coding of non-feedback trials. Data across 3 experiments with selective decision-contingent and selective outcome-contingent feedback provide support for the hypothesis of constructivist coding (E. Elwin, P. Juslin, H. Olsson, & T. Enkvist, 2007), according to which the outcomes on non-feedback trials are coded with the most likely outcome, as inferred by the individual. The relation to sampling-based approaches to judgment, and the adaptive significance of constructivist coding, are discussed.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Stengård, Elina, 1988-, et al.
(författare)
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How Deep Is Your Bayesianism? : Peeling the Layers of the Intuitive Bayesian
- 2022
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Ingår i: Decision. - : American Psychological Association (APA). - 2325-9965 .- 2325-9973. ; 9:4, s. 321-346
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Studies in perception have found that humans often behave in accordance with Bayesian principles, while studies in higher-level cognition tend to find the opposite. A key methodological difference is that perceptual studies typically focus on whether people weight sensory cues according to their precision (determined by sensory noise levels), while studies with cognitive tasks concentrate on explicit inverse inference from likelihoods to posteriors. Here, we investigate if lay-people spontaneously engage in precision weighting in three cognitive inference tasks that require combining prior information with new data. We peel the layers of the “intuitive Bayesian” by categorizing participants into four categories: (a) No appreciation for the need to consider both prior and data; (b) Consideration of both prior and data; (c) Appreciation of the need to weight the prior and data according to their precision; (d) Ability to explicitly distinguish the inverse probabilities and perform inferences from description (rather than experience). The results suggest that with a lenient coding criterion, 58% of the participants appreciated the need to consider both the prior and data, 25% appreciated the need to weight them with their precision, but only 12% correctly solved the tasks that required understanding of inverse probabilities. Hence, while many participants weigh the data against priors, as in perceptual studies, they seem to have difficulty with “unpacking” symbols into their real-world extensions, like frequencies and sample sizes, and understanding inverse probability. Regardless of other task differences, people thus have larger difficulty with aspects of Bayesian performance typically probed in “cognitive studies.”
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| 6. |
- Stengård, Elina, 1988-, et al.
(författare)
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On the generality and cognitive basis of base-rate neglect
- 2022
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Ingår i: Cognition. - : Elsevier BV. - 0010-0277 .- 1873-7838. ; 226
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Base rate neglect refers to people's apparent tendency to underweight or even ignore base rate information when estimating posterior probabilities for events, such as the probability that a person with a positive cancer-test outcome actually does have cancer. While often replicated, almost all evidence for the phenomenon comes from studies that used problems with extremely low base rates, high hit rates, and low false alarm rates. It is currently unclear whether the effect generalizes to reasoning problems outside this “corner” of the entire problem space. Another limitation of previous studies is that they have focused on describing empirical patterns of the effect at the group level and not so much on the underlying strategies and individual differences. Here, we address these two limitations by testing participants on a broader problem space and modeling their responses at a single-participant level. We find that the empirical patterns that have served as evidence for base-rate neglect generalize to a larger problem space, albeit with large individual differences in the extent with which participants “neglect” base rates. In particular, we find a bi-modal distribution consisting of one group of participants who almost entirely ignore the base rate and another group who almost entirely account for it. This heterogeneity is reflected in the cognitive modeling results: participants in the former group were best captured by a linear-additive model, while participants in the latter group were best captured by a Bayesian model. We find little evidence for heuristic models. Altogether, these results suggest that the effect known as “base-rate neglect” generalizes to a large set of reasoning problems, but varies largely across participants and may need a reinterpretation in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms.
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| 7. |
- Blåvarg, Christina
(författare)
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The alluring nature of episodic odor memory : Sensory and cognitive correlates across age and sex
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Episodic memory for olfactory information is still relatively uncharted. The overall purpose of this thesis is to investigate the sensory and cognitive causes of the well-established age-related decline in olfactory episodic odor memory and of the age-independent sex difference in olfactory episodic memory. The purpose of Study I was to investigate the causes of the sex difference in olfactory episodic memory. The results show that the female advantage in episodic recognition memory seems to be explained by women´s higher aptitude in odor identification for familiar odors. With this background, the purpose of Study II was to investigate the age-related decline in olfactory episodic memory, with a particular eye to the role of odor identification. When controlling for the sensory variables olfactory threshold and odor quality discrimination, and the cognitive factor mental speed, the age-related deterioration in odor identification was eliminated. This suggests that changes in basic sensory and cognitive abilities underlie the age-related impairment in odor identification. The purpose of Study III was to investigate the role of recollective experience and intention to memorize for age-related and sex-related differences in episodic odor memory. Younger adults reported more experiences of remembering, and the elderly adults more experiences of feeling of knowing. The participants benefited from intentionality at encoding when the odors were unfamiliar, but intentionality did not affect memory for the familiar odors. The purpose of Study IV was to investigate the role of subjectively perceived qualities of the encoded odors for episodic memory across age and sex. Odors perceived as unpleasant, intense, and irritable were more easily remembered throughout the adult life span. The oldest adults selectively recognized the odors they rated as highly irritable indicating compensatory use of trigeminal activation. Overall, the result suggests that episodic odor memory rely heavily on both sensory and cognitive abilities, but in a different manner depending on demographic factors. The age-related decline appears to be driven by a sensory flattening disabling adequate cognitive processing. The age-independent sex difference on the other hand, is mainly cognitively mediated and driven by cognitive factors such as the ability to verbalize olfactory information.
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| 8. |
- Elwin, Ebba, 1974-
(författare)
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Learning With Selective Feedback : Effects on Performance and Coding of Unknown Outcomes
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In experiential learning, one important source of information is the feedback that people receive on the outcomes of their decisions. Typically, however, feedback is systematically absent for many decisions and the actual experience of people may therefore be highly selective. It is thus surprising that research on the cognitive processes involved in human judgement and categorisation has not addressed the effects of learning with selective feedback. In this thesis, three studies are presented in which the effects of learning with systematically selective feedback were investigated. The hypothesis of constructivist coding was introduced in Study I, suggesting a cognitive mechanism for the processing of selective information. In the absence of external feedback people infer the most likely outcome, and then code this inference into memory as “internal feedback”. This internally generated feedback is stored and processed in the same manner as externally presented feedback and is used as a basis for beliefs about the characteristics of the environment. Results from Studies I, II, and III demonstrated support for constructivist coding under varied learning conditions. Study III investigated the effects on the beliefs of participants when they learn from feedback received only for positive decisions. Results indicated that the participants’ beliefs well reflected their actual, however selective, experience. When participants aimed to achieve good immediate outcomes, their experience became restrictive and biased, resulting in biased beliefs. In contrast, when the focus of participants was on long-term learning, their decisions produced a more representative experience and their beliefs came to reflect the actual structure of the environment. Biased beliefs were thus demonstrated to result from a sensitivity of participants to selectively available information. The present findings offer an understanding of the cognitive processes involved in learning from selectively absent feedback. The conclusions propose a sensitivity of participants to objectively experienced information in the forming of knowledge and beliefs. Further, when external information is absent, participants appear to rely on their knowledge and expectations to infer and code the most likely outcome, and use these stored inferences to form a coherent representation of the environment.
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| 9. |
- Guath, Mona, et al.
(författare)
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Why do people pursue goals sequentially when they try to balance cost and utility?
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Cognitive Psychology. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2044-5911 .- 2044-592X. ; 33:8, s. 931-950
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While research in Cognitive Psychology has investigated people's ability to use feedback to pursue a single goal, little research has addressed their ability to use feedback to pursue multiple goals. We investigated the reasons for the sequential goal pursuit observed in previous research using a multiple-cue-probability learning task aiming at teaching energy efficiency, specifically, if it derives from cognitive constraints. The task was to balance utility (comfort) against cost, with an explicit budget for both variables (Experiment 1); with utility expressed in an accessible unit (Experiment 2); and with utility represented by a linear function (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the sequential goal pursuit behaviour is driven by limits on cognitive capacity that are little affected by training and goal phrasing. One cognitive constraint was the difficulty with interpreting the effect of actions on the nonlinear utility, which reinforced an initial priority assigned to actions on the linear cost.
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| 10. |
- Guath, Mona, et al.
(författare)
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Why Do People Pursue Goals Sequentially when they Try to Balance the Cost and the Utility in an Electricity Consumption Task?
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- While research in Cognitive Psychology has investigated people’s ability to use feedback to pursue a single goal, little research has addressed their ability to use feedback to pursue multiple goals. In a study (Juslin et al., 2016) that investigated people’s ability to use electricity efficiently in a simulated household, balancing the cost of its use against its utility, results showed that the goals were addressed sequentially, first the cost, thereafter the utility. In the present study, we investigated the reasons for this sequential goal pursuit and, specifically, if it derives from cognitive constraints. In Experiment 1, we tested if cost and utility are pursued simultaneously if they are equally emphasized by an explicit “budget”. In Experiment 2, we tested if the initial priority assigned to cost derives from its larger evaluability. In Experiment 3, we tested if cost and utility are pursued simultaneously if not only cost but also utility is represented by a linear function. The results suggest that the sequential goal pursuit is driven by limits on cognitive capacity that are little affected by training, goal phrasing, and function form. We found no evidence that the initial priority assigned to cost is caused by its higher evaluability or its linear function form.
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