Psych Bulletin & Review - June 2018

VOLUME 25, ISSUE 3

Bayesian techniques for analyzing group differences in the Iowa Gambling Task: A care study of intuitive and deliberate decision-makers (Steingroever, Pachur, Smira, & Lee)                                        This review paper provides a proposed Bayesian hierarchical analysis model (including a brief review of Bayesian statistics) and suggests the proposed methodology’s application to IGT data of intuitive and deliberate decision-makers. The authors suggest using cognitive models, specifically three complementary Bayesian analyses, to determine whether decision-makers behavior is driven by different psychological processes

'''Ability and sex differences in spatial thinking: What does the mental rotation test really measure? (Hegarty)''' With two studies, the authors identified the strategies used in a MRT with concurrent and retrospective verbal protocols, sex differences in strategy use, the relationships between test performance and strategy use, as well as the strategies used in a MRT without verbal reports. The researchers found that participants used a variety of strategies, with mental rotation not being the only strategy. Most participants reported using strategies such as perspective taking, counting cubes, local turns, and global shapes.

The importance of age-related differences in prospective memory: Evidence from diffusion model analyses (Ball & Aschenbrenner) The authors examined monitoring and cue detection in young and older adults. To do this, participants were either instructed that detecting PM cues or doing well on the ongoing task was most important. The researchers expected differences across conditions to be dependent on age. The results showed that emphasizing the importance of PM benefits older adults more at a cost to ongoing task performance. Diffusion modeling showed that this decrease in performance was not due to attention allocation away from the ongoing task. Instead, participants were allowing more time for PM selection and target-checking. Functionally independent processes may be facilitating PM.

OTHER PAPERS OF INTEREST:

Release from PI: An analysis and a model (Mewhort, Shabahang, & Franklin)

Active listening delays attentional disengagement and saccadic eye movements (Lester & Vecera)

Filtering visual onsets via habituation: A context-specific long-term memory of irrelevant stimuli (Turatto, Bonetti, & Pascucci)

Acquisition of habitual visual attention and transfer to related tasks (Salovich, Remington, & Jiang)

Enhanced recognition of memorable pictures in ultra-fast RSVP (Broers, Potter, & Nieuwenstein)

Recognition-induced forgetting does not occur for temporally grouped objects unless they are semantically related (Maxcey, Glenn, & Stansberry)

Partition dependence in consumer choice: Perceptual groupings do not reliably shape decisions (Reichelson, Zax, Bass, Patalano, & Barth)

2 commentaries + 2 replies to this probabilistic reasoning paper: Pighin, S., Tentori, K., & Girotto V. (2017). Another chance for good reasoning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24, 1995-2002.

-- PIGHIN ET AL. (2017) ABSTRACT: Disagreement on the “probability status” of chances casts doubt on Girotto and Gonzalez’s (2001) conclusion that the human mind can make sound Bayesian inferences involving single-event probabilities. The main objection raised has been that chances are de facto natural frequencies disguised as probabilities. In the present study, we empirically demonstrated that numbers of chances are perceived as being distinct from natural frequencies and that they have a facilitatory effect on Bayesian inference tasks that is completely independent from their (minor) frequentist readings. Overall, therefore, our results strongly disconfirm the hypothesis that natural frequencies are a privileged cognitive representational format for Bayesian inferences and suggest that a significant portion of laypeople adequately handle genuine single-event probability problems once these are rendered computationally more accessible by using numbers of chances.