Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a h...

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Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises:

The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set of 18 reliable empirical finding is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories ―relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading― are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more sucessful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention

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Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: an integrative review.

This article reviews a diverse set of proposals for dual processing in higher cognition within largely disconnected literatures in cognitive and social psychology. All these theories have in common the distinction between cognitive processes that are fast, automatic, and unconscious and those that are slow, deliberative, and conscious. A number of authors have recently suggested that there may be two architecturally (and evolutionarily) distinct cognitive systems underlying these dual-process accounts. However, it emerges that (a) there are multiple kinds of implicit processes described by different theorists and (b) not all of the proposed attributes of the two kinds of processing can be sensibly mapped on to two systems as currently conceived. It is suggested that while some dual-process theories are concerned with parallel competing processes involving explicit and implicit knowledge systems, others are concerned with the influence of preconscious processes that contextualize and shape deliberative reasoning and decision-making.

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Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social Cognition

A review is presented of the book “Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment,” edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman.

Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. One of the oldest conundrums in psychology is whether people are best conceived as parallel processors of information who operate along diffuse associative links or as analysts who operate by deliberate and sequential manipulation of internal representations. Are inferences drawn through a network of learned associative pathways or through application of a kind of"psychologic" that manipulates symbolic tokens in a rule-governed way? The debate has raged (again) in cognitive psychology for almost a decade now. It has pitted those who prefer models of mental phenomena to be built out of networks of associative devices that pass activation around in parallel and distributed form (the way brains probably function) against those who prefer models built out of formal languages in which symbols are composed into sentences that are processed sequentially (the way computers function). An obvious solution to the conundrum is to conceive of the

/pdf/the-empirical-case-for-two-systems-of-reasoning-3qiztlk5di.pdf

The empirical case for two systems of reasoning.

Language and reasoning: a study of temporal factors

SUMMARY Studies are reported that demonstrate the stability of scales of the arousal strength of warning signal words[ We demonstrate that these scales are not an artefact of the measurement technique employed\ nor are they in~uenced by the e}ects of experimental context[ In addition\ we generalize previous _ndings on the arousal strength of signal words to the UK population[ Separate studies revealed a high level of agreement in signal word arousal strengths derived from magnitude estimation\ category estimation\ and cross!modality matching[ In addition\ the relative arousal strengths of signal words were shown to be independent of the composition of the warning stimulus set[ These _ndings suggest that arousal strength scales of signal words are robust and that signal words can be used with con_dence to achieve hazard matching between the hazard inherent in a product:situation and the hazard implied by the associated warning[ Copyright 1999 John Wiley + Sons\ Ltd[

On the stability of the arousal strength of warning signal words

Three studies are reported which investigated the existence of sex bias in the marking of undergraduate degrees. Study 1 failed to find any evidence that females were marked less extremely than males by second markers, as has been found in previous research. Study 2 found that marker disagreements were not resolved upwards more frequently for male candidates, again contradicting the results of some previous research. Study 3 failed to find any of the expected differences between an institution using blind marking and one using non‐blind procedures. In the light of this negative evidence and of the confusing picture presented by. previous research, it is concluded that there is little firm evidence for sex bias in marking. Despite this, it is likely that there will be increasing pressure to adopt blind marking in the future.

Blind marking and sex bias in student assessment

According to mental models theory, a key aspect of deductive reasoning is the production of alternative models that can falsify provisional conclusions. In the present paper, the possibility is investigated that there are individual differences in the ability to produce alternative models. The results indicate that some people do not proceed beyond the first model when they reason with syllogisms but that others do. Furthermore, the ability to generate alternatives can be independently measured by asking participants to generate different representations of pairs of premises. These findings support the predictions of mental models theory and also indicate the potential importance of alternatives generation as a measure of individual differences in processing style.

/pdf/generating-alternatives-a-key-component-in-human-reasoning-1evgesf7iz.pdf

Generating alternatives: A key component in human reasoning?

There is much empirical evidence showing that factors other than the relative positions of objects in Euclidean space are important in the comprehension of a wide range of spatial prepositions in English and other languages. We first the overview the functional geometric framework [11] which puts “what” and “where” information together to underpin the situation specific meaning of spatial terms. We then outline an implementation of this framework. The computational model for the processing of visual scenes and the identification of the appropriate spatial preposition consists of three main modules: (1) Vision Processing, (2) Elman Network, (3) Dual-Route Network. Mirroring data from experiments with human participants, we show that the model is both able to predict what will happen to objects in a scene, and use these judgements to influence the appropriateness of over/under/above/below to describe where objects are located in the scene. Extensions of the model to other prepositions and quantifiers are discussed.

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Stephen E. Newstead

Papers

Language and reasoning: a study of temporal factors

On the stability of the arousal strength of warning signal words

Blind marking and sex bias in student assessment

Generating alternatives: A key component in human reasoning?

Spatial prepositions and vague quantifiers: implementing the functional geometric framework