| 1. |
- 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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| 2. |
- Lidén, Moa, 1986-
(författare)
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Confirmation Bias in Criminal Cases
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Confirmation bias is a tendency to selectively search for and emphasize information that is consistent with a preferred hypothesis, whereas opposing information is ignored or downgraded. This thesis examines the role of confirmation bias in criminal cases, primarily focusing on the Swedish legal setting. It also examines possible debiasing techniques.Experimental studies with Swedish police officers, prosecutors and judges (Study I-III) and an archive study of appeals and petitions for new trials (Study IV) were conducted. The results suggest that confirmation bias is at play to varying degrees at different stages of the criminal procedure. Also, the explanations and possible ways to prevent the bias seem to vary for these different stages. In Study I police officers’ more guilt presumptive questions to apprehended than non-apprehended suspects indicate a confirmation bias. This seems primarily driven by cognitive factors and reducing cognitive load is therefore a possible debiasing technique. In Study II prosecutors did not display confirmation bias before but only after the decision to press charges, as they then were less likely to consider additional investigation necessary and suggested more guilt confirming investigation. The driving forces need further examination. Study III suggests that pretrial detentions influence judges’ perception of the evidence strength, making them more likely to convict, in cases where they themselves detained. This is indicative of a confirmation bias with social explanations, which, possibly, can be mitigated by changing decision maker between detention and main hearing. The confirmatory reasoning in Study I-III can be considered rational or irrational, following different types of rationality, like probabilistic or judicial rationality. In Study IV, statistical estimates based on empirical data from the Apellate Courts and the Supreme Court indicate that far from all wrongfully convicted who appeal or petition for a new trial are acquitted. A robustness analysis confirmed that these overall conclusions hold over a wide variety of assumptions regarding unknown parameters. Also, the usage of empirical methods to study law and legal phenomena is discussed. The concept of Evidence-Based Law (EBL) is used to exemplify how empirical legal research may benefit both legal scholarship and law in a wider sense.
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| 3. |
- Stikvoort, Britt, 1989-
(författare)
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Why act sustainable? : Exploring what can be learnt from different approaches to motivations for pro-environmental behaviour
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- To combat anthropogenic climate change, greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced. Though one person’s actions cannot turn the tide, so to say, the combined effort of many individuals can. To this end, numerous studies have investigated theoretically supported motivations – for example financial, environmental, hedonistic, moral, or normative motivations – underlying pro-environmental behaviours. To understand the causal relationship between these motivations and behaviours, studies tend to look at how such variables are associated across individuals. In observational studies, it is not easy to infer whether associations indicate a causal process or emerge from confounding pathways. This implies that positive associations between motivations and behaviour in an observational study do not necessarily imply that increasing individuals’ motivations will increase pro-environmental behaviour.This thesis presents and discusses studies that investigated associations between motivations and intentions to engage in pro-environmental behaviour using two different research designs – observational and experimental – and by looking at inter- and intraindividual variation in observational data. Papers I-III reveal that in data from observational designs, associations between motivations and intentions differ contingent on whether one uses an inter- or intraindividual approach to variation. Concretely, while financial and normative motivations were not predictive of variation in intentions between individuals, they were predictive of variation in intentions within individuals. That is, those with stronger financial and normative motivations compared to others did not have stronger intentions, per se, yet, when an individual reported a stronger financial or normative motivation for a specific behaviour compared to other behaviours, they tended to have stronger intentions towards the behaviour. In Paper III, an experimental manipulation that raised environmental motivations was not found to raise intentions. Overall, when associations are investigated in a way that is more closely aligned with the theoretically proposed mechanism (i.e., causal processes occurring within individuals), there seems more support for the motivational hypotheses predicted by theories.
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| 4. |
- Öhrlund, Isak, 1988-
(författare)
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Demand Side Response : Exploring How and Why Users Respond to Signals Aimed at Incentivizing a Shift of Electricity Use in Time
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- With increased weather-dependent electricity production and electrification at the heart of the ongoing transition away from fossil fuels, peaks in electricity demand are set to increase and become increasingly difficult to meet, which threatens the functioning of the electric power systems that our society depends on. Time-varying electricity rates, which aim to incentivize electricity users to shift their electricity use in time, have been proposed as a key instrument in alleviating grid imbalances and bottlenecks. Previous research has found that users respond to such rates by shifting their electricity use in time, but there is great variability in the observed response between studies that remains unexplained. In other words, it is unclear how and why users respond to time-varying rates, and thus how these so called demand side response policies should be designed to provide the best results.This thesis aims to improve our understanding of how and why (not) time-varying rates work by exploring how users respond to both price and non-price signals that aim to incentivize a shift of electricity use in time, and what motivates, discourages, enables and hinders them to respond. This is done through four separate studies that are carried out in contexts where users have been involuntarily subjected to interventions that aim to incentivize demand side response. Using several novel methods, research designs and understudied empirical contexts, the studies also illustrate how biases that are commonly observed in the literature can be avoided and how intervention effects that often remain overlooked can be captured.The results suggest that users may hold different motives to respond to signals that aim to incentivize a shift of electricity use in time, including non-financial motives such as a care for the environment and a will to meet the expectations of others. The rhythms and schedules of people’s everyday lives are identified as the most important hindrances for people to engage in demand side response. Notably, there is no evident relationship between how much money users may save by responding to a signal and their actual response. Many users do hold expectations of saving money and claim to engage in demand side response as a result of those expectations, but the fact that users are rarely (if ever) informed of whether their expectations are met or not suggests that many users may actually be willing to engage in demand side response with little or no financial reward. However, there is a risk that users who expect to save money may refrain from or stop engaging in demand side response if their expectations are not met, which poses a potential threat to the long-run effectiveness of conventional price-based demand response programs. There is also a risk that users who primarily hold non-financial motives may be discouraged to engage in demand side response if monetary savings is the key selling point of demand response programs. Policymakers, professionals and researchers should explore these risks and alternative policies that address them, particularly policies that may be more appealing to users that hold non-financial motives to engage in demand side response. Doing so will be key to ensure that current and future demand side response policies are cost-efficient and effective, both today and tomorrow.
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| 5. |
- 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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| 6. |
- Hansson, Patrik, 1976-
(författare)
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A naïve sampling model of intuitive confidence intervals
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A particular field in research on judgment and decision making (JDM) is concerned with realism of confidence in one’s knowledge. An interesting finding is the so-called format dependence effect, which implies that assessment of the same probability distribution generates different conclusions about over- or underconfidence depending on the assessment format. In particular, expressing a belief about some unknown continuous quantity (e.g., a stock value) in the form of an intuitive confidence interval is severely prone to overconfidence as compared to expressing the belief as an assessment of a probability judgment. This thesis gives a tentative account of this finding in terms of a Naïve Sampling Model, which assumes that people accurately describe their available information stored in memory, but they are naïve in the sense that they treat sample properties as proper estimators of population properties (Study 1). The effect of this naivety is directly investigated empirically in Study 2. A prediction that short-term memory is a constraining factor for sample size in judgment, suggesting that experience per se does not eliminate overconfidence is investigated and verified in Study 3. Age-related increments in overconfidence were observed with intuitive confidence interval but not for probability judgment (Study 4). This thesis suggests that no cognitive processing bias (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) over and above naivety is needed to understand and explain the overconfidence “bias” with intuitive confidence interval and hence the format dependence effect.
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| 7. |
- Hansson, Patrik
(författare)
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Overconfidence and Format Dependence in Subjective Probability Intervals: Naive Estimation and Constrained Sampling
- 2005
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A particular field in research on judgment and decision making (JDM) is concerned with realism of confidence in one’s knowledge. An interesting finding is the so-called format dependence effect which implies that assessment of the same probability distribution generates different conclusions about over- or underconfidence bias depending on the assessment format. In particular,expressing a belief about some unknown quantity in the form of a confidence interval is severely prone to overconfidence as compared to expressing the belief as an assessment of a probability. This thesis gives a tentative account of this finding in terms of a Naïve Sampling Model (NSM;Juslin, Winman, & Hansson, 2004), which assumes that people accurately describe their available information stored in memory but they are naïve in the sense that they treat sample properties as proper estimators of population properties. The NSM predicts that it should be possible to reducethe overconfidence in interval production by changing the response format into interval evaluation and to manipulate the degree of format dependence between interval production and interval evaluation. These predictions are verified in empirical experiments which contain both general knowledge tasks (Study 1) and laboratory learning tasks (Study 2). A bold hypothesis,that working memory is a constraining factor for sample size in judgment which suggests that experience per se does not eliminate overconfidence, is investigated and verified. The NSM predicts that the absolute error of the placement of the interval is a constant fraction of interval size, a prediction that is verified (Study 2). This thesis suggests that no cognitive processing bias(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) over and above naivety is needed to understand and explain the overconfidence bias in interval production and hence the format dependence effect.
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| 8. |
- Karlsson, Linnea
(författare)
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Additive Integration of Information in Multiple-Cue Judgment
- 2004
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates adaptive shifts between different cognitive processes in multiple-cue judgment tasks. At least two qualitatively and quantitatively different cognitive strategies can be identified: one process in which abstraction and integration of cue-criterion relations form the basis for the judgment (Einhorn, Kleinmutz & Kleinmutz, 1979) and one which is based onsimilarity comparisons between a probe and similar exemplars stored in memory (Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Nosofsky, 1984; Nosofsky & Johanssen, 2000). Within the framework of a proposed model of judgment, Σ, these processes are regarded as complementary means to deal with a proposed capacity limitation of our cognitive architecture; in situations of unaidedabstraction and integration of information we are forced to handle pieces of information in an additive and linear manner. Predictions by Σ concern which of the two processes that will dominate judgments in different judgment tasks. In a judgment task where the underlying combination rule is additive and linear we are able to abstract and integrate information on how cues relate to a criterion and produce judgments that are consistent with the combination rule. In a judgment task where the underlying combination rule is multiplicative we are not able to abstract and integrate this information, and we are therefore induced to use a strategy of exemplar memory. Two studies test these predictions. In Study 1 the results confirm that in an additive judgment task cue abstraction was induced, while exemplar memory was induced in amultiplicative task. These results were replicated in Study 2, where a more complex judgment task was used. The results reported in this thesis provide tentative support for the idea of an adaptive division of labor between cue abstraction and exemplar memory as a function of the task, an ability we are equipped with to cope with a cognitive architecture only allowingelaboration of information in an additive and linear manner.
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| 9. |
- Collsiöö, August, et al.
(författare)
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Is numerical information always beneficial? : Verbal and numerical cue-integration in additive and non-additive tasks
- 2023
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Ingår i: Cognition. - : Elsevier. - 0010-0277 .- 1873-7838. ; 240
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- When people use rule-based integration of abstracted cues to make multiple-cue judgments they tend to default to linear additive integration of the cues, which may interfere with efficient learning in non-additive tasks. We hypothesize that this effect becomes especially pronounced when cues are presented numerically rather than verbally, because numbers elicit expectations about a task with a simple numerical solution that can be appropriately addressed by linear and additive integration. This predicts that, relative to a verbal format, a numerical format should be advantageous for learning in additive tasks, but detrimental for learning in non-additive tasks. In two experiments, we find support for the hypothesis that a verbal format can improve learning in non-additive tasks. The division-of-labor between cognitive processes observed in previous research (Juslin et al., 2008), with cue abstraction in additive tasks and exemplar memory in non-additive tasks, was only present in conditions with numeric information and may therefore in part be driven by the use of numeric formats. This illustrates how surface characteristic of stimuli can elicit different priors about the nature of the variables and the generative model that produced the cues and the criterion. We fitted cue-abstraction and exemplar algorithms by PNP-modeling (Sundh et al., 2021). At the end of training both cue abstraction and exemplar memory processes primarily involved exact analytic processes marred by occasional error, rather than the noisy and approximate intuitive processes typically assumed in previous studies – specifically, cue abstraction was primarily implemented by number crunching and exemplar memory by rote memorization.
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| 10. |
- Gruber, Michael
(författare)
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Dyslexics' phonological processing in relation to speech perception
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The general aim of this thesis was to investigate phonological processing skills in dyslexic children and adults and their relation to speech perception. Dyslexia can be studied at various levels: at a biological, cognitive and an environmental level. This thesis mainly looks at environmental and cognitive factors. It is a commonly held view that dyslexia is related to problems with phonological processing, that is, dyslexics have problems dealing with the sound structure of language. The problem is for example seen in tasks where the individual has to manipulate sound segments in the spoken language, read non-words, rapidly name pictures and digits, keep verbal material in short-term memory, and categorize and discriminate sound contrasts in speech perception. To fully understand the dyslexic’s problems we have to investigate both children and adults since the problems might change during the lifespan as a result of changes in the language system and compensatory mechanisms in the poor reader. Research indicates that adult dyslexics can reach functional reading proficiency but still perform poorly on tasks of phonological processing. Even though they can manage many everyday reading situations problems often arise when adult dyslexics enter higher education. The phonological problems of dyslexics are believed to be related to the underlying phonological representations of the language. The phonological representations have been hypothesized to be weakly specified or indistinct and/or not enough segmented. Deviant phonological representations are believed to cause problems when the mapping of written language is to be made to the phonological representations of spoken language during reading acquisition. In Paper 1 adults’ phonological processing and reading habits were investigated in order to increase our understanding of how the reading problems develop into adulthood and what the social consequences are. The results showed that adult dyslexics remained impaired in their phonological processing and that they differed substantially from controls in their choices regarding higher education and also regarding reading habits. Paper 2 reviews research that has used the sine wave speech paradigm in studies of speech perception. The paper also gives a detailed description of how sine wave speech is made and how it can be characterized. Sine wave speech is a course grained description of natural speech lacking phonetic detail. In Paper 3 sine wave speech varying with regard to how much suprasegmental information it contains is employed. Results showed that dyslexics were poorer at identifying monosyllabic words but not disyllabic words and a sentence, plausibly because the dyslexics had problems identifying the phonetic information in monosyllabic words. Paper 4 tested dyslexics’ categorization performance of fricative-vowel syllables and the results showed that dyslexics were less consistent than controls in their categorization indicating poorer sensitivity to phonetic detail. In all the results of the thesis are in line with the phonological deficit hypothesis as revealed by adult data and the performance on task of speech perception. It is concluded that dyslexic children and adults seem to have less well specified phonological representations.
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