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Sample records for making temporal judgments

  1. A psychophysical investigation of differences between synchrony and temporal order judgments.

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    Love, Scott A; Petrini, Karin; Cheng, Adam; Pollick, Frank E

    2013-01-01

    Synchrony judgments involve deciding whether cues to an event are in synch or out of synch, while temporal order judgments involve deciding which of the cues came first. When the cues come from different sensory modalities these judgments can be used to investigate multisensory integration in the temporal domain. However, evidence indicates that that these two tasks should not be used interchangeably as it is unlikely that they measure the same perceptual mechanism. The current experiment further explores this issue across a variety of different audiovisual stimulus types. Participants were presented with 5 audiovisual stimulus types, each at 11 parametrically manipulated levels of cue asynchrony. During separate blocks, participants had to make synchrony judgments or temporal order judgments. For some stimulus types many participants were unable to successfully make temporal order judgments, but they were able to make synchrony judgments. The mean points of subjective simultaneity for synchrony judgments were all video-leading, while those for temporal order judgments were all audio-leading. In the within participants analyses no correlation was found across the two tasks for either the point of subjective simultaneity or the temporal integration window. Stimulus type influenced how the two tasks differed; nevertheless, consistent differences were found between the two tasks regardless of stimulus type. Therefore, in line with previous work, we conclude that synchrony and temporal order judgments are supported by different perceptual mechanisms and should not be interpreted as being representative of the same perceptual process.

  2. A Psychophysical Investigation of Differences between Synchrony and Temporal Order Judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Love, Scott A.; Petrini, Karin; Cheng, Adam; Pollick, Frank E.

    2013-01-01

    Background Synchrony judgments involve deciding whether cues to an event are in synch or out of synch, while temporal order judgments involve deciding which of the cues came first. When the cues come from different sensory modalities these judgments can be used to investigate multisensory integration in the temporal domain. However, evidence indicates that that these two tasks should not be used interchangeably as it is unlikely that they measure the same perceptual mechanism. The current experiment further explores this issue across a variety of different audiovisual stimulus types. Methodology/Principal Findings Participants were presented with 5 audiovisual stimulus types, each at 11 parametrically manipulated levels of cue asynchrony. During separate blocks, participants had to make synchrony judgments or temporal order judgments. For some stimulus types many participants were unable to successfully make temporal order judgments, but they were able to make synchrony judgments. The mean points of subjective simultaneity for synchrony judgments were all video-leading, while those for temporal order judgments were all audio-leading. In the within participants analyses no correlation was found across the two tasks for either the point of subjective simultaneity or the temporal integration window. Conclusions Stimulus type influenced how the two tasks differed; nevertheless, consistent differences were found between the two tasks regardless of stimulus type. Therefore, in line with previous work, we conclude that synchrony and temporal order judgments are supported by different perceptual mechanisms and should not be interpreted as being representative of the same perceptual process. PMID:23349971

  3. A psychophysical investigation of differences between synchrony and temporal order judgments.

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    Scott A Love

    Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Synchrony judgments involve deciding whether cues to an event are in synch or out of synch, while temporal order judgments involve deciding which of the cues came first. When the cues come from different sensory modalities these judgments can be used to investigate multisensory integration in the temporal domain. However, evidence indicates that that these two tasks should not be used interchangeably as it is unlikely that they measure the same perceptual mechanism. The current experiment further explores this issue across a variety of different audiovisual stimulus types. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants were presented with 5 audiovisual stimulus types, each at 11 parametrically manipulated levels of cue asynchrony. During separate blocks, participants had to make synchrony judgments or temporal order judgments. For some stimulus types many participants were unable to successfully make temporal order judgments, but they were able to make synchrony judgments. The mean points of subjective simultaneity for synchrony judgments were all video-leading, while those for temporal order judgments were all audio-leading. In the within participants analyses no correlation was found across the two tasks for either the point of subjective simultaneity or the temporal integration window. CONCLUSIONS: Stimulus type influenced how the two tasks differed; nevertheless, consistent differences were found between the two tasks regardless of stimulus type. Therefore, in line with previous work, we conclude that synchrony and temporal order judgments are supported by different perceptual mechanisms and should not be interpreted as being representative of the same perceptual process.

  4. The temporal-relevance temporal-uncertainty model of prospective duration judgment.

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    Zakay, Dan

    2015-12-15

    A model aimed at explaining prospective duration judgments in real life settings (as well as in the laboratory) is presented. The model is based on the assumption that situational meaning is continuously being extracted by humans' perceptual and cognitive information processing systems. Time is one of the important dimensions of situational meaning. Based on the situational meaning, a value for Temporal Relevance is set. Temporal Relevance reflects the importance of temporal aspects for enabling adaptive behavior in a specific moment in time. When Temporal Relevance is above a certain threshold a prospective duration judgment process is evoked automatically. In addition, a search for relevant temporal information is taking place and its outcomes determine the level of Temporal Uncertainty which reflects the degree of knowledge one has regarding temporal aspects of the task to be performed. The levels of Temporal Relevance and Temporal Uncertainty determine the amount of attentional resources allocated for timing by the executive system. The merit of the model is in connecting timing processes with the ongoing general information processing stream. The model rests on findings in various domains which indicate that cognitive-relevance and self-relevance are powerful determinants of resource allocation policy. The feasibility of the model is demonstrated by analyzing various temporal phenomena. Suggestions for further empirical validation of the model are presented. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  5. Criminal decision making: the development of adolescent judgment, criminal responsibility, and culpability.

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    Fried, C S; Reppucci, N D

    2001-02-01

    Theories of judgment in decision making hypothesize that throughout adolescence, judgment is impaired because the development of several psychosocial factors that are presumed to influence decision making lags behind the development of the cognitive capacities that are required to make mature decisions. This study uses an innovative video technique to examine the role of several psychosocial factors--temporal perspective, peer influence, and risk perception--in adolescent criminal decision making. Results based on data collected from 56 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 years revealed that detained youth were more likely to think of future-oriented consequences of engaging in the depicted delinquent act and less likely to anticipate pressure from their friends than nondetained youth. Examination of the developmental functions of the psychosocial factors indicates age-based differences on standardized measures of temporal perspective and resistance to peer influence and on measures of the role of risk perception in criminal decision making. Assessments of criminal responsibility and culpability were predicted by age and ethnicity. Implications for punishment in the juvenile justice system are discussed.

  6. Simultaneity and Temporal Order Judgments Are Coded Differently and Change With Age: An Event-Related Potential Study

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    Aysha Basharat

    2018-04-01

    Full Text Available Multisensory integration is required for a number of daily living tasks where the inability to accurately identify simultaneity and temporality of multisensory events results in errors in judgment leading to poor decision-making and dangerous behavior. Previously, our lab discovered that older adults exhibited impaired timing of audiovisual events, particularly when making temporal order judgments (TOJs. Simultaneity judgments (SJs, however, were preserved across the lifespan. Here, we investigate the difference between the TOJ and SJ tasks in younger and older adults to assess neural processing differences between these two tasks and across the lifespan. Event-related potentials (ERPs were studied to determine between-task and between-age differences. Results revealed task specific differences in perceiving simultaneity and temporal order, suggesting that each task may be subserved via different neural mechanisms. Here, auditory N1 and visual P1 ERP amplitudes confirmed that unisensory processing of audiovisual stimuli did not differ between the two tasks within both younger and older groups, indicating that performance differences between tasks arise either from multisensory integration or higher-level decision-making. Compared to younger adults, older adults showed a sustained higher auditory N1 ERP amplitude response across SOAs, suggestive of broader response properties from an extended temporal binding window. Our work provides compelling evidence that different neural mechanisms subserve the SJ and TOJ tasks and that simultaneity and temporal order perception are coded differently and change with age.

  7. Judgment and decision making.

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    Mellers, B A; Schwartz, A; Cooke, A D

    1998-01-01

    For many decades, research in judgment and decision making has examined behavioral violations of rational choice theory. In that framework, rationality is expressed as a single correct decision shared by experimenters and subjects that satisfies internal coherence within a set of preferences and beliefs. Outside of psychology, social scientists are now debating the need to modify rational choice theory with behavioral assumptions. Within psychology, researchers are debating assumptions about errors for many different definitions of rationality. Alternative frameworks are being proposed. These frameworks view decisions as more reasonable and adaptive that previously thought. For example, "rule following." Rule following, which occurs when a rule or norm is applied to a situation, often minimizes effort and provides satisfying solutions that are "good enough," though not necessarily the best. When rules are ambiguous, people look for reasons to guide their decisions. They may also let their emotions take charge. This chapter presents recent research on judgment and decision making from traditional and alternative frameworks.

  8. Temporal-order judgment of visual and auditory stimuli: Modulations in situations with and without stimulus discrimination

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    Elisabeth eHendrich

    2012-08-01

    Full Text Available Temporal-order judgment (TOJ tasks are an important paradigm to investigate processing times of information in different modalities. There are a lot of studies on how temporal order decisions can be influenced by stimuli characteristics. However, so far it has not been investigated whether the addition of a choice reaction time task has an influence on temporal-order judgment. Moreover, it is not known when during processing the decision about the temporal order of two stimuli is made. We investigated the first of these two questions by comparing a regular TOJ task with a dual task. In both tasks, we manipulated different processing stages to investigate whether the manipulations have an influence on temporal-order judgment and to determine thereby the time of processing at which the decision about temporal order is made. The results show that the addition of a choice reaction time task does have an influence on the temporal-order judgment, but the influence seems to be linked to the kind of manipulation of the processing stages that is used. The results of the manipulations indicate that the temporal order decision in the dual task paradigm is made after perceptual processing of the stimuli.

  9. Judgments relative to patterns: how temporal sequence patterns affect judgments and memory.

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    Kusev, Petko; Ayton, Peter; van Schaik, Paul; Tsaneva-Atanasova, Krasimira; Stewart, Neil; Chater, Nick

    2011-12-01

    Six experiments studied relative frequency judgment and recall of sequentially presented items drawn from 2 distinct categories (i.e., city and animal). The experiments show that judged frequencies of categories of sequentially encountered stimuli are affected by certain properties of the sequence configuration. We found (a) a first-run effect whereby people overestimated the frequency of a given category when that category was the first repeated category to occur in the sequence and (b) a dissociation between judgments and recall; respondents may judge 1 event more likely than the other and yet recall more instances of the latter. Specifically, the distribution of recalled items does not correspond to the frequency estimates for the event categories, indicating that participants do not make frequency judgments by sampling their memory for individual items as implied by other accounts such as the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) and the availability process model (Hastie & Park, 1986). We interpret these findings as reflecting the operation of a judgment heuristic sensitive to sequential patterns and offer an account for the relationship between memory and judged frequencies of sequentially encountered stimuli.

  10. Frontopolar and anterior temporal cortex activation in a moral judgment task. Preliminary functional MRI results in normal subjects

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    Moll, Jorge; Oliveira-Souza, Ricardo de

    2001-01-01

    The objective was to study the brain areas which are activated when normal subjects make moral judgments. Ten normal adults underwent BOLD functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during the auditory presentation of sentences that they were instructed to silently judge as either 'right' or 'wrong'. Half of the sentences had an explicit moral content ('We break the law when necessary'), the other half comprised factual statements devoid of moral connotation ('Stones are made of water'). After scanning, each subject rated the moral content, emotional valence, and judgment difficulty of each sentence on Likert-like scales. To exclude the effect of emotion on the activation results, individual responses were hemo dynamically modeled for event-related f MRI analysis. The general linear model was used to evaluate the brain areas activated by moral judgment. Regions activated during moral judgment included the frontopolar cortex (FPC), medial frontal gyrus, right anterior temporal cortex, lenticular nucleus, and cerebellum. Activation of FPC and medial frontal gyrus (B A 10/46 and 9) were largely independent of emotional experience and represented the largest areas of activation. These results concur with clinical observations assigning a critical role for the frontal poles and right anterior temporal cortex in the mediation of complex judgment processes according to moral constraints. The FPC may work in concert with the orbitofrontal and dorsolateral cortex in the regulation of human social conduct. (author)

  11. A judgment and decision-making model for plant behavior.

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    Karban, Richard; Orrock, John L

    2018-06-12

    Recently plant biologists have documented that plants, like animals, engage in many activities that can be considered as behaviors, although plant biologists currently lack a conceptual framework to understand these processes. Borrowing the well-established framework developed by psychologists, we propose that plant behaviors can be constructively modeled by identifying four distinct components: 1) a cue or stimulus that provides information, 2) a judgment whereby the plant perceives and processes this informative cue, 3) a decision whereby the plant chooses among several options based on their relative costs and benefits, and 4) action. Judgment for plants can be determined empirically by monitoring signaling associated with electrical, calcium, or hormonal fluxes. Decision-making can be evaluated empirically by monitoring gene expression or differential allocation of resources. We provide examples of the utility of this judgment and decision-making framework by considering cases in which plants either successfully or unsuccessfully induced resistance against attacking herbivores. Separating judgment from decision-making suggests new analytical paradigms (i.e., Bayesian methods for judgment and economic utility models for decision-making). Following this framework, we propose an experimental approach to plant behavior that explicitly manipulates the stimuli provided to plants, uses plants that vary in sensory abilities, and examines how environmental context affects plant responses. The concepts and approaches that follow from the judgment and decision-making framework can shape how we study and understand plant-herbivore interactions, biological invasions, plant responses to climate change, and the susceptibility of plants to evolutionary traps. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

  12. Frontopolar and anterior temporal cortex activation in a moral judgment task. Preliminary functional MRI results in normal subjects

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    Moll, Jorge [LABS and Rede D' Or Hospitais, Rio de Janeiro RJ (Brazil). Grupo de Neuroimagem e Neurologia do Comportamento; Eslinger, Paul J. [Pensylvania State Univ. (United States). College of Medicine. Div. of Neurology and Behavioral Science; The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PN (United States); Oliveira-Souza, Ricardo de [Universidade do Rio de Janeiro (UNI-Rio), RJ (Brazil). Hospital Universitario Gaffree e Guinle]. E-mail: neuropsychiatry@hotmail.com

    2001-09-01

    The objective was to study the brain areas which are activated when normal subjects make moral judgments. Ten normal adults underwent BOLD functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during the auditory presentation of sentences that they were instructed to silently judge as either 'right' or 'wrong'. Half of the sentences had an explicit moral content ('We break the law when necessary'), the other half comprised factual statements devoid of moral connotation ('Stones are made of water'). After scanning, each subject rated the moral content, emotional valence, and judgment difficulty of each sentence on Likert-like scales. To exclude the effect of emotion on the activation results, individual responses were hemo dynamically modeled for event-related f MRI analysis. The general linear model was used to evaluate the brain areas activated by moral judgment. Regions activated during moral judgment included the frontopolar cortex (FPC), medial frontal gyrus, right anterior temporal cortex, lenticular nucleus, and cerebellum. Activation of FPC and medial frontal gyrus (B A 10/46 and 9) were largely independent of emotional experience and represented the largest areas of activation. These results concur with clinical observations assigning a critical role for the frontal poles and right anterior temporal cortex in the mediation of complex judgment processes according to moral constraints. The FPC may work in concert with the orbitofrontal and dorsolateral cortex in the regulation of human social conduct. (author)

  13. c-Fos expression during temporal order judgment in mice.

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    Makoto Wada

    Full Text Available The neuronal mechanisms for ordering sensory signals in time still need to be clarified despite a long history of research. To address this issue, we recently developed a behavioral task of temporal order judgment in mice. In the present study, we examined the expression of c-Fos, a marker of neural activation, in mice just after they carried out the temporal order judgment task. The expression of c-Fos was examined in C57BL/6N mice (male, n = 5 that were trained to judge the order of two air-puff stimuli delivered bilaterally to the right and left whiskers with stimulation intervals of 50-750 ms. The mice were rewarded with a food pellet when they responded by orienting their head toward the first stimulus (n = 2 or toward the second stimulus (n = 3 after a visual "go" signal. c-Fos-stained cell densities of these mice (test group were compared with those of two control groups in coronal brain sections prepared at bregma -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2 mm by applying statistical parametric mapping to the c-Fos immuno-stained sections. The expression of c-Fos was significantly higher in the test group than in the other groups in the bilateral barrel fields of the primary somatosensory cortex, the left secondary somatosensory cortex, the dorsal part of the right secondary auditory cortex. Laminar analyses in the primary somatosensory cortex revealed that c-Fos expression in the test group was most evident in layers II and III, where callosal fibers project. The results suggest that temporal order judgment involves processing bilateral somatosensory signals through the supragranular layers of the primary sensory cortex and in the multimodal sensory areas, including marginal zone between the primary somatosensory cortex and the secondary sensory cortex.

  14. Perceptual Computing Aiding People in Making Subjective Judgments

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    Mendel, Jerry

    2010-01-01

    Explains for the first time how "computing with words" can aid in making subjective judgments. Lotfi Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic, coined the phrase "computing with words" (CWW) to describe a methodology in which the objects of computation are words and propositions drawn from a natural language. Perceptual Computing explains how to implement CWW to aid in the important area of making subjective judgments, using a methodology that leads to an interactive device—a "Perceptual Computer"—that propagates random and linguistic uncertainties into the subjective judg

  15. Temporal Order Judgment Reveals How Number Magnitude Affects Visuospatial Attention

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    Casarotti, Marco; Michielin, Marika; Zorzi, Marco; Umilta, Carlo

    2007-01-01

    The existence of spatial components in the mental representation of number magnitude has raised the question regarding the relation between numbers and spatial attention. We present six experiments in which this relation was examined using a temporal order judgment task to index attentional allocation. Results demonstrate that one important…

  16. On judgment and judgmentalism: how counselling can make people better.

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    Gibson, S

    2005-10-01

    Counsellors, like other members of the caring professions, are required to practise within an ethical framework, at least in so far as they seek professional accreditation. As such, the counsellor is called upon to exercise her moral agency. In most professional contexts this requirement is, in itself, unproblematic. It has been suggested, however, that counselling practice does present a problem in this respect, in so far as the counsellor is expected to take a non-judgemental stance and an attitude of "unconditional positive regard" toward the client. If, as might appear to be the case, this stance and attitude are at odds with the making of moral judgments, the possibility of an adequate ethics of counselling is called into question. This paper explores the nature and extent of the problem suggesting that, understood in a Kantian context, non-judgmentalism can be seen to be at odds with neither the moral agency of the counsellor nor that of the client. Instead, it is argued, the relationship between the non-judgmental counsellor and her client is a fundamentally moral relationship, based on respect for the client's unconditional worth as a moral agent.

  17. Improving Adolescent Judgment and Decision Making

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    Dansereau, Donald F.; Knight, Danica K.; Flynn, Patrick M.

    2013-01-01

    Human judgment and decision making (JDM) has substantial room for improvement, especially among adolescents. Increased technological and social complexity “ups the ante” for developing impactful JDM interventions and aids. Current explanatory advances in this field emphasize dual processing models that incorporate both experiential and analytic processing systems. According to these models, judgment and decisions based on the experiential system are rapid and stem from automatic reference to previously stored episodes. Those based on the analytic system are viewed as slower and consciously developed. These models also hypothesize that metacognitive (self-monitoring) activities embedded in the analytic system influence how and when the two systems are used. What is not included in these models is the development of an intersection between the two systems. Because such an intersection is strongly suggested by memory and educational research as the basis of wisdom/expertise, the present paper describes an Integrated Judgment and Decision-Making Model (IJDM) that incorporates this component. Wisdom/expertise is hypothesized to contain a collection of schematic structures that can emerge from the accumulation of similar episodes or repeated analytic practice. As will be argued, in comparisons to dual system models, the addition of this component provides a broader basis for selecting and designing interventions to improve adolescent JDM. Its development also has implications for generally enhancing cognitive interventions by adopting principles from athletic training to create automated, expert behaviors. PMID:24391350

  18. Judgment and Decision Making in Outdoor Adventure Leadership: A Dual-Process Model

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    Culp, Clinton A.

    2016-01-01

    From an examination of the current textbooks and literature concerning judgment and decision-making models used in outdoor adventure leadership, it is easy to see that they are still deeply rooted in the classical decision-making theory. In this article, I will (a) outline the importance of good judgment and decision making in an outdoor adventure…

  19. Who makes utilitarian judgments? The influences of emotions on utilitarian judgments

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    So Young Choe

    2011-10-01

    Full Text Available Recent research has emphasized emotion's role in non-utilitarian judgments, but has not focused much on characteristics of subjects contributing to those judgments. The present article relates utilitarian judgment to individual disposition to experience various emotions. Study 1 first investigated the relationship among state emotions and utilitarian judgment. Diverse emotions were elicited during judgment: guilt, sadness, disgust, empathy, anger, and anxiety, etc. Using psychological scales, Study 2 found that trait emotions predict the extent of utilitarian judgments, especially trait anger, trait disgust, and trait empathy. Unlike previous research that designated emotions only as factors mitigating utilitarian judgment, this research shows that trait anger correlates positively with utilitarian judgment. On the other hand, disgust and empathy correlated negatively. Guilt and shame---though previous research argued that their absence increased utilitarian judgment---appear unrelated to the extent of utilitarian judgment. These results suggest that people's emotional dispositions can affect their judgment. This finding might contribute to untangling the complex mechanisms of utilitarian judgments.

  20. A neural model for temporal order judgments and their active recalibration: a common mechanism for space and time?

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    Mingbo eCai

    2012-11-01

    Full Text Available When observers experience a constant delay between their motor actions and sensory feedback, their perception of the temporal order between actions and sensations adapt (Stetson et al., 2006a. We present here a novel neural model that can explain temporal order judgments (TOJs and their recalibration. Our model employs three ubiquitous features of neural systems: 1 information pooling, 2 opponent processing, and 3 synaptic scaling. Specifically, the model proposes that different populations of neurons encode different delays between motor-sensory events, the outputs of these populations feed into rivaling neural populations (encoding before and after, and the activity difference between these populations determines the perceptual judgment. As a consequence of synaptic scaling of input weights, motor acts which are consistently followed by delayed sensory feedback will cause the network to recalibrate its point of subjective simultaneity. The structure of our model raises the possibility that recalibration of TOJs is a temporal analogue to the motion aftereffect. In other words, identical neural mechanisms may be used to make perceptual determinations about both space and time. Our model captures behavioral recalibration results for different numbers of adapting trials and different adapting delays. In line with predictions of the model, we additionally demonstrate that temporal recalibration can last through time, in analogy to storage of the motion aftereffect.

  1. Fitting model-based psychometric functions to simultaneity and temporal-order judgment data: MATLAB and R routines.

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    Alcalá-Quintana, Rocío; García-Pérez, Miguel A

    2013-12-01

    Research on temporal-order perception uses temporal-order judgment (TOJ) tasks or synchrony judgment (SJ) tasks in their binary SJ2 or ternary SJ3 variants. In all cases, two stimuli are presented with some temporal delay, and observers judge the order of presentation. Arbitrary psychometric functions are typically fitted to obtain performance measures such as sensitivity or the point of subjective simultaneity, but the parameters of these functions are uninterpretable. We describe routines in MATLAB and R that fit model-based functions whose parameters are interpretable in terms of the processes underlying temporal-order and simultaneity judgments and responses. These functions arise from an independent-channels model assuming arrival latencies with exponential distributions and a trichotomous decision space. Different routines fit data separately for SJ2, SJ3, and TOJ tasks, jointly for any two tasks, or also jointly for the three tasks (for common cases in which two or even the three tasks were used with the same stimuli and participants). Additional routines provide bootstrap p-values and confidence intervals for estimated parameters. A further routine is included that obtains performance measures from the fitted functions. An R package for Windows and source code of the MATLAB and R routines are available as Supplementary Files.

  2. Cognitive abilities required in time judgment depending on the temporal tasks used: A comparison of children and adults.

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    Droit-Volet, S; Wearden, J H; Zélanti, P S

    2015-01-01

    The aim of this study was to examine age-related differences in time judgments during childhood as a function of the temporal task used. Children aged 5 and 8 years, as well as adults, were submitted to 3 temporal tasks (bisection, generalization and reproduction) with short (0.4/0.8 s) and long durations (8/16 s). Furthermore, their cognitive capacities in terms of working memory, attentional control, and processing speed were assessed by a wide battery of neuropsychological tests. The results showed that the age-related differences in time judgment were greater in the reproduction task than in the temporal discrimination tasks. This task was indeed more demanding in terms of working memory and information processing speed. In addition, the bisection task appeared to be easier for children than the generalization task, whereas these 2 tasks were similar for the adults, although the generalization task required more attention to be paid to the processing of durations. Our study thus demonstrates that it is important to understand the different cognitive processes involved in time judgment as a function of the temporal tasks used before venturing to draw conclusions about the development of time perception capabilities.

  3. Judgment and decision making.

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    Fischhoff, Baruch

    2010-09-01

    The study of judgment and decision making entails three interrelated forms of research: (1) normative analysis, identifying the best courses of action, given decision makers' values; (2) descriptive studies, examining actual behavior in terms comparable to the normative analyses; and (3) prescriptive interventions, helping individuals to make better choices, bridging the gap between the normative ideal and the descriptive reality. The research is grounded in analytical foundations shared by economics, psychology, philosophy, and management science. Those foundations provide a framework for accommodating affective and social factors that shape and complement the cognitive processes of decision making. The decision sciences have grown through applications requiring collaboration with subject matter experts, familiar with the substance of the choices and the opportunities for interventions. Over the past half century, the field has shifted its emphasis from predicting choices, which can be successful without theoretical insight, to understanding the processes shaping them. Those processes are often revealed through biases that suggest non-normative processes. The practical importance of these biases depends on the sensitivity of specific decisions and the support that individuals have in making them. As a result, the field offers no simple summary of individuals' competence as decision makers, but a suite of theories and methods suited to capturing these sensitivities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  4. Judgments about Judgments: The Dissociation of Consideration Price and Transaction Commitment Judgments

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    Janiszewski, Chris; Lichtenstein, Donald R.; Belyavsky, Julia

    2008-01-01

    There are many contexts in which people make judgments about prior judgments. For example, Internet shopping bots (e.g., NexTag.com) allow consumers to search for products and, if the price is too high, list a price at which they would consider making the purchase (i.e., base judgment). If the price drops to this level, the vendor generates an…

  5. Automatic and controlled components of judgment and decision making.

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    Ferreira, Mario B; Garcia-Marques, Leonel; Sherman, Steven J; Sherman, Jeffrey W

    2006-11-01

    The categorization of inductive reasoning into largely automatic processes (heuristic reasoning) and controlled analytical processes (rule-based reasoning) put forward by dual-process approaches of judgment under uncertainty (e.g., K. E. Stanovich & R. F. West, 2000) has been primarily a matter of assumption with a scarcity of direct empirical findings supporting it. The present authors use the process dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) to provide convergent evidence validating a dual-process perspective to judgment under uncertainty based on the independent contributions of heuristic and rule-based reasoning. Process dissociations based on experimental manipulation of variables were derived from the most relevant theoretical properties typically used to contrast the two forms of reasoning. These include processing goals (Experiment 1), cognitive resources (Experiment 2), priming (Experiment 3), and formal training (Experiment 4); the results consistently support the author's perspective. They conclude that judgment under uncertainty is neither an automatic nor a controlled process but that it reflects both processes, with each making independent contributions.

  6. Are emotions necessary and sufficient for making moral judgments?

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    Marco Aurélio Sousa Alves

    2013-07-01

    Full Text Available http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1677-2954.2013v12n1p113 Jesse Prinz (2006, 2007 claimed that emotions are necessary and sufficient for moral judgments. First of all, I clarify what this claim amounts to. The view that he labels emotionism will then be critically assessed. Prinz marshals empirical findings to defend a series of increasingly strong theses about how emotions are essential for moral judgments. I argue that the empirical support upon which his arguments are based is not only insufficient, but it even suggests otherwise, if properly interpreted. My criticism is then extended to his sentimentalist theory, that accounts for how emotions are integrated into moral judgments. The central problem is that Prinz’s view fails to capture the rational aspect of moral evaluation. I make this failure explicit and defend that some version or other of neosentimentalism is a more promising route.

  7. TESTING MASTER STUDENTS PERCEPTION REGARDING JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING IN ACCOUNTING

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    2015-07-01

    Full Text Available The human mind is amazing. Judgment and reasoning is also a fascinating and complex world. The purpose of this paper is to link the perception of master students to professional judgment and decision making in accounting and to analyze and test some correlations between endogenous human variables and the act of reasoning. The variables were selected after studying psychology cognition literature based on works conducted by researchers interested in matters like economics or financial reporting. Our research was carried out based on a questionnaire and the investigation was conducted in October-November 2014, being elected economics master students from University of Oradea, Faculty of Economics, majors AABM and FBI. These majors were chosen because their academic curricula contain accounting disciplines. We have received answers from 106 students. Intentionally, the study was conducted on economic master students rather than on professional accountants because for the former making logical judgments for assigning an appropriate accounting treatment of an event requires more effort, more attention. Taking into account works done by previous researchers interested in the topic of heuristics for making accounting judgments we have statistically tested our research hypotheses. The obtained results showed that there is a weak influence between the master students’ age and the way they make decisions and their perception on the necessity of existence of a theoretical conceptual framework for professional JDM in accounting and there is a correlation between master students’ ability to assume risks and their opinion on the choice of accounting handling. The main finding of this empirical study is that such research topic is worth to be continued to investigate and develop other possible links between psychological triggers and JDM in accounting.

  8. A Blind Spot in Research on Foreign Language Effects in Judgment and Decision-Making

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    Polonioli, Andrea

    2018-01-01

    One of the most fascinating topics of current investigation in the literature on judgment and decision-making concerns the exploration of foreign language effects (henceforth, FLE). Specifically, recent research suggests that presenting information in a foreign language helps reasoners make better choices. However, this piece aims at making scholars aware of a blind spot in this stream of research. In particular, research on FLE has imported only one view of judgment and decision-making, in which the heuristics that people use are seen as conducive to biases and, in turn, to costly mistakes. But heuristics are not necessarily a liability, and this article indicates two routes to push forward research on FLE in judgment and decision-making. First, research on FLE should be expanded to explore also classes of fast and frugal heuristics, which have been shown to lead to accurate predictions in several contexts characterized by uncertainty. Second, research on FLE should be open to challenge the interpretations given to previous FLE findings, since alternative accounts are plausible and not ruled out by evidence. PMID:29662457

  9. A Blind Spot in Research on Foreign Language Effects in Judgment and Decision-Making

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Andrea Polonioli

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available One of the most fascinating topics of current investigation in the literature on judgment and decision-making concerns the exploration of foreign language effects (henceforth, FLE. Specifically, recent research suggests that presenting information in a foreign language helps reasoners make better choices. However, this piece aims at making scholars aware of a blind spot in this stream of research. In particular, research on FLE has imported only one view of judgment and decision-making, in which the heuristics that people use are seen as conducive to biases and, in turn, to costly mistakes. But heuristics are not necessarily a liability, and this article indicates two routes to push forward research on FLE in judgment and decision-making. First, research on FLE should be expanded to explore also classes of fast and frugal heuristics, which have been shown to lead to accurate predictions in several contexts characterized by uncertainty. Second, research on FLE should be open to challenge the interpretations given to previous FLE findings, since alternative accounts are plausible and not ruled out by evidence.

  10. A Blind Spot in Research on Foreign Language Effects in Judgment and Decision-Making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Polonioli, Andrea

    2018-01-01

    One of the most fascinating topics of current investigation in the literature on judgment and decision-making concerns the exploration of foreign language effects (henceforth, FLE). Specifically, recent research suggests that presenting information in a foreign language helps reasoners make better choices. However, this piece aims at making scholars aware of a blind spot in this stream of research. In particular, research on FLE has imported only one view of judgment and decision-making, in which the heuristics that people use are seen as conducive to biases and, in turn, to costly mistakes. But heuristics are not necessarily a liability, and this article indicates two routes to push forward research on FLE in judgment and decision-making. First, research on FLE should be expanded to explore also classes of fast and frugal heuristics, which have been shown to lead to accurate predictions in several contexts characterized by uncertainty. Second, research on FLE should be open to challenge the interpretations given to previous FLE findings, since alternative accounts are plausible and not ruled out by evidence.

  11. Spatio-temporal patterns of event-related potentials related to audiovisual synchrony judgments in older adults.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chan, Yu Man; Pianta, Michael Julian; Bode, Stefan; McKendrick, Allison Maree

    2017-07-01

    Older adults have altered perception of the relative timing between auditory and visual stimuli, even when stimuli are scaled to equate detectability. To help understand why, this study investigated the neural correlates of audiovisual synchrony judgments in older adults using electroencephalography (EEG). Fourteen younger (18-32 year old) and 16 older (61-74 year old) adults performed an audiovisual synchrony judgment task on flash-pip stimuli while EEG was recorded. All participants were assessed to have healthy vision and hearing for their age. Observers responded to whether audiovisual pairs were perceived as synchronous or asynchronous via a button press. The results showed that the onset of predictive sensory information for synchrony judgments was not different between groups. Channels over auditory areas contributed more to this predictive sensory information than visual areas. The spatial-temporal profile of the EEG activity also indicates that older adults used different resources to maintain a similar level of performance in audiovisual synchrony judgments compared with younger adults. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  12. What are judgment skills in health literacy? A psycho-cognitive perspective of judgment and decision-making research

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Riva S

    2015-11-01

    Full Text Available Silvia Riva,1 Alessandro Antonietti,2 Paola Iannello,2 Gabriella Pravettoni1–3 1Department of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Milan, Milan, Italy; 2Department of Psychology, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy; 3Applied Research Division for Cognitive and Psychological Science, European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy Objective: The aim of this review is to summarize current research relating to psychological processes involved in judgment and decision-making (JDM and identify which processes can be incorporated and used in the construct of health literacy (HL in order to enrich its conceptualization and to provide more information about people’s preferences.Methods: The literature review was aimed at identifying comprehensive research in the field; therefore appropriate databases were searched for English language articles dated from 1998 to 2015. Results: Several psychological processes have been found to be constituents of JDM and potentially incorporated in the definition of HL: cognition, self-regulation, emotion, reasoning-thinking, and social perception. Conclusion: HL research can benefit from this JDM literature overview, first, by elaborating on the idea that judgment is multidimensional and constituted by several specific processes, and second, by using the results to implement the definition of “judgment skills”. Moreover, this review can favor the development of new instruments that can measure HL. Practical implications: Future researchers in HL should work together with researchers in psychological sciences not only to investigate the processes behind JDM in-depth but also to create effective opportunities to improve HL in all patients, to promote good decisions, and orient patients’ preferences in all health contexts. Keywords: health literacy, judgment, decision-making, psychological processes, skills, cognitive factors

  13. An Overview of Judgment and Decision Making Research Through the Lens of Fuzzy Trace Theory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Setton, Roni; Wilhelms, Evan; Weldon, Becky; Chick, Christina; Reyna, Valerie

    2014-12-01

    We present the basic tenets of fuzzy trace theory, a comprehensive theory of memory, judgment, and decision making that is grounded in research on how information is stored as knowledge, mentally represented, retrieved from storage, and processed. In doing so, we highlight how it is distinguished from traditional models of decision making in that gist reasoning plays a central role. The theory also distinguishes advanced intuition from primitive impulsivity. It predicts that different sorts of errors occur with respect to each component of judgment and decision making: background knowledge, representation, retrieval, and processing. Classic errors in the judgment and decision making literature, such as risky-choice framing and the conjunction fallacy, are accounted for by fuzzy trace theory and new results generated by the theory contradict traditional approaches. We also describe how developmental changes in brain and behavior offer crucial insight into adult cognitive processing. Research investigating brain and behavior in developing and special populations supports fuzzy trace theory's predictions about reliance on gist processing.

  14. Social Decision Making Social Dilemmas, Social Values, and Ethical Judgments

    CERN Document Server

    Kramer, Roderick M; Bazerman, Max H

    2009-01-01

    This book, in honor of David Messick, is about social decisions and the role cooperation plays in social life. Noted contributors who worked with Dave over the years will discuss their work in social judgment, decision making and ethics which was so important to Dave.The book offers a unique and valuable contribution to the fields of social psychology and organizational behavior. Ethical decision making, a central focus of this volume, is highly relevant to current scholarship and research in both disciplines. The volume will be suitable for graduate level courses in organizational behavior, s

  15. Mistaking Judgments of the Agreeable and Judgments of Taste

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Francis Raven

    2008-12-01

    Full Text Available In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant develops a rigorous formulation of aesthetic judgments, in which he makes a sharp distinction between judgments of taste and judgments of the agreeable (both of which are, I claim, types of aesthetic judgments if only to dismiss judgments of the agreeable as worthy objects of study. Kant is primarily concerned with judgments of taste, the main example of which is judging something to be beautiful (whether it be a work of art or a natural object. He asserts that such judgments are subjective, universal, necessary, disinterested, and do not presuppose a purpose. The other type of aesthetic judgment are judgments of the agreeable, “which are the kind of judgment expressed by saying simply that one likes something or finds it pleasing.” These are judgments of what, in Kant’s words, please “the senses in sensation” as opposed to pleasing ourcognition in reflection.

  16. The decision making individual differences inventory and guidelines for the study of individual differences in judgment and decision-making research

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Appelt, K.C.; Milch, K.F.; Handgraaf, M.J.J.; Weber, E.U.

    2011-01-01

    Individual differences in decision making are a topic of longstanding interest, but often yield inconsistent and contradictory results. After providing an overview of individual difference measures that have commonly been used in judgment and decision-making (JDM) research, we suggest that our

  17. What are judgment skills in health literacy? A psycho-cognitive perspective of judgment and decision-making research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Riva, Silvia; Antonietti, Alessandro; Iannello, Paola; Pravettoni, Gabriella

    2015-01-01

    The aim of this review is to summarize current research relating to psychological processes involved in judgment and decision-making (JDM) and identify which processes can be incorporated and used in the construct of health literacy (HL) in order to enrich its conceptualization and to provide more information about people's preferences. The literature review was aimed at identifying comprehensive research in the field; therefore appropriate databases were searched for English language articles dated from 1998 to 2015. Several psychological processes have been found to be constituents of JDM and potentially incorporated in the definition of HL: cognition, self-regulation, emotion, reasoning-thinking, and social perception. HL research can benefit from this JDM literature overview, first, by elaborating on the idea that judgment is multidimensional and constituted by several specific processes, and second, by using the results to implement the definition of "judgment skills". Moreover, this review can favor the development of new instruments that can measure HL. Future researchers in HL should work together with researchers in psychological sciences not only to investigate the processes behind JDM in-depth but also to create effective opportunities to improve HL in all patients, to promote good decisions, and orient patients' preferences in all health contexts.

  18. Interhemispheric coupling between the posterior sylvian regions impacts successful auditory temporal order judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bernasconi, Fosco; Grivel, Jeremy; Murray, Micah M; Spierer, Lucas

    2010-07-01

    Accurate perception of the temporal order of sensory events is a prerequisite in numerous functions ranging from language comprehension to motor coordination. We investigated the spatio-temporal brain dynamics of auditory temporal order judgment (aTOJ) using electrical neuroimaging analyses of auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) recorded while participants completed a near-threshold task requiring spatial discrimination of left-right and right-left sound sequences. AEPs to sound pairs modulated topographically as a function of aTOJ accuracy over the 39-77ms post-stimulus period, indicating the engagement of distinct configurations of brain networks during early auditory processing stages. Source estimations revealed that accurate and inaccurate performance were linked to bilateral posterior sylvian regions activity (PSR). However, activity within left, but not right, PSR predicted behavioral performance suggesting that left PSR activity during early encoding phases of pairs of auditory spatial stimuli appears critical for the perception of their order of occurrence. Correlation analyses of source estimations further revealed that activity between left and right PSR was significantly correlated in the inaccurate but not accurate condition, indicating that aTOJ accuracy depends on the functional decoupling between homotopic PSR areas. These results support a model of temporal order processing wherein behaviorally relevant temporal information--i.e. a temporal 'stamp'--is extracted within the early stages of cortical processes within left PSR but critically modulated by inputs from right PSR. We discuss our results with regard to current models of temporal of temporal order processing, namely gating and latency mechanisms. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  19. Rational non-interventional paternalism: why doctors ought to make judgments of what is best for their patients.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Savulescu, J

    1995-12-01

    This paper argues that doctors ought to make all things considered value judgments about what is best for their patients. It illustrates some of the shortcomings of the model of doctor as 'fact-provider'. The 'fact-provider' model fails to take account of the fact that practising medicine necessarily involves making value judgments; that medical practice is a moral practice and requires that doctors reflect on what ought to be done, and that patients can make choices which fail to express their autonomy and which are based on mistaken judgments of value. If doctors are properly to respect patient autonomy and to function as moral agents, they must make evaluations of what their patients ought to do, all things considered. This paper argues for 'rational, non-interventional paternalism'. This is a practice in which doctors form conceptions of what is best for their patients and argue rationally with them. It differs from old-style paternalism in that it is not committed to doing what is best.

  20. Bayesian calibration of simultaneity in audiovisual temporal order judgments.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Shinya Yamamoto

    Full Text Available After repeated exposures to two successive audiovisual stimuli presented in one frequent order, participants eventually perceive a pair separated by some lag time in the same order as occurring simultaneously (lag adaptation. In contrast, we previously found that perceptual changes occurred in the opposite direction in response to tactile stimuli, conforming to bayesian integration theory (bayesian calibration. We further showed, in theory, that the effect of bayesian calibration cannot be observed when the lag adaptation was fully operational. This led to the hypothesis that bayesian calibration affects judgments regarding the order of audiovisual stimuli, but that this effect is concealed behind the lag adaptation mechanism. In the present study, we showed that lag adaptation is pitch-insensitive using two sounds at 1046 and 1480 Hz. This enabled us to cancel lag adaptation by associating one pitch with sound-first stimuli and the other with light-first stimuli. When we presented each type of stimulus (high- or low-tone in a different block, the point of simultaneity shifted to "sound-first" for the pitch associated with sound-first stimuli, and to "light-first" for the pitch associated with light-first stimuli. These results are consistent with lag adaptation. In contrast, when we delivered each type of stimulus in a randomized order, the point of simultaneity shifted to "light-first" for the pitch associated with sound-first stimuli, and to "sound-first" for the pitch associated with light-first stimuli. The results clearly show that bayesian calibration is pitch-specific and is at work behind pitch-insensitive lag adaptation during temporal order judgment of audiovisual stimuli.

  1. FRAMING EFFECTS ON PHYSICIANS' JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bui, Thanh C; Krieger, Heather A; Blumenthal-Barby, Jennifer S

    2015-10-01

    This study aimed to assess physicians' susceptibility to framing effects in clinical judgment and decision making. A survey was administered online to 159 general internists in the United States. Participants were randomized into two groups, in which clinical scenarios varied in their framings: frequency vs percentage, with cost information vs without, female patient vs male patient, and mortality vs survival. Results showed that physicians' recommendations for patients in hypothetical scenarios were significantly different when the predicted probability of the outcomes was presented in frequency versus percentage form and when it was presented in mortality rate vs survival rate of the same magnitude. Physicians' recommendations were not different for other framing effects.

  2. Anhedonia reflects impairment in making relative value judgments between positive and neutral stimuli in schizophrenia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Strauss, Gregory P; Visser, Katherine Frost; Keller, William R; Gold, James M; Buchanan, Robert W

    2018-02-27

    Anhedonia (i.e., diminished capacity to experience pleasure) has traditionally been viewed as a core symptom of schizophrenia (SZ). However, modern laboratory-based studies suggest that this definition may be incorrect, as hedonic capacity may be intact. Alternative conceptualizations have proposed that anhedonia may reflect an impairment in generating mental representations of affective value that are needed to guide decision-making and initiate motivated behavior. The current study evaluated this hypothesis in 42 outpatients with SZ and 19 healthy controls (CN) who completed two tasks: (a) an emotional experience task that required them to indicate how positive, negative, and calm/excited they felt in response to a single emotional or neutral photograph; (b) a relative value judgment task where they selected which of 2 photographs they preferred. Results indicated that SZ and CN reported similar levels of positive emotion and arousal in response to emotional and neutral stimuli; however, SZ reported higher negative affect for neutral and pleasant stimuli than CN. In the relative value judgment task, CN displayed clear preference for stimuli differing in valence; however, SZ showed less distinct preferences for positive over neutral stimuli. Findings suggest that although in-the-moment experiences of positive emotion to singular stimuli may be intact in SZ, the ability to make relative value judgments that are needed to guide decision-making is impaired. Original conceptualizations of anhedonia as a diminished capacity for pleasure in SZ may be inaccurate; anhedonia may more accurately reflect a deficit in relative value judgment that results from impaired value representation. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  3. Adaptive decision making in a dynamic environment: a test of a sequential sampling model of relative judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vuckovic, Anita; Kwantes, Peter J; Neal, Andrew

    2013-09-01

    Research has identified a wide range of factors that influence performance in relative judgment tasks. However, the findings from this research have been inconsistent. Studies have varied with respect to the identification of causal variables and the perceptual and decision-making mechanisms underlying performance. Drawing on the ecological rationality approach, we present a theory of the judgment and decision-making processes involved in a relative judgment task that explains how people judge a stimulus and adapt their decision process to accommodate their own uncertainty associated with those judgments. Undergraduate participants performed a simulated air traffic control conflict detection task. Across two experiments, we systematically manipulated variables known to affect performance. In the first experiment, we manipulated the relative distances of aircraft to a common destination while holding aircraft speeds constant. In a follow-up experiment, we introduced a direct manipulation of relative speed. We then fit a sequential sampling model to the data, and used the best fitting parameters to infer the decision-making processes responsible for performance. Findings were consistent with the theory that people adapt to their own uncertainty by adjusting their criterion and the amount of time they take to collect evidence in order to make a more accurate decision. From a practical perspective, the paper demonstrates that one can use a sequential sampling model to understand performance in a dynamic environment, allowing one to make sense of and interpret complex patterns of empirical findings that would otherwise be difficult to interpret using standard statistical analyses. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

  4. Judgments of brand similarity

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Bijmolt, THA; Wedel, M; Pieters, RGM; DeSarbo, WS

    This paper provides empirical insight into the way consumers make pairwise similarity judgments between brands, and how familiarity with the brands, serial position of the pair in a sequence, and the presentation format affect these judgments. Within the similarity judgment process both the

  5. Age-related changes in visual temporal order judgment performance: Relation to sensory and cognitive capacities.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Busey, Thomas; Craig, James; Clark, Chris; Humes, Larry

    2010-08-06

    Five measures of temporal order judgments were obtained from 261 participants, including 146 elder, 44 middle aged, and 71 young participants. Strong age group differences were observed in all five measures, although the group differences were reduced when letter discriminability was matched for all participants. Significant relations were found between these measures of temporal processing and several cognitive and sensory assays, and structural equation modeling revealed the degree to which temporal order processing can be viewed as a latent factor that depends in part on contributions from sensory and cognitive capacities. The best-fitting model involved two different latent factors representing temporal order processing at same and different locations, and the sensory and cognitive factors were more successful predicting performance in the different location factor than the same-location factor. Processing speed, even measured using high-contrast symbols on a paper-and-pencil test, was a surprisingly strong predictor of variability in both latent factors. However, low-level sensory measures also made significant contributions to the latent factors. The results demonstrate the degree to which temporal order processing relates to other perceptual and cognitive capacities, and address the question of whether age-related declines in these capacities share a common cause. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  6. Audiovisual Simultaneity Judgment and Rapid Recalibration throughout the Lifespan.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Noel, Jean-Paul; De Niear, Matthew; Van der Burg, Erik; Wallace, Mark T

    2016-01-01

    Multisensory interactions are well established to convey an array of perceptual and behavioral benefits. One of the key features of multisensory interactions is the temporal structure of the stimuli combined. In an effort to better characterize how temporal factors influence multisensory interactions across the lifespan, we examined audiovisual simultaneity judgment and the degree of rapid recalibration to paired audiovisual stimuli (Flash-Beep and Speech) in a sample of 220 participants ranging from 7 to 86 years of age. Results demonstrate a surprisingly protracted developmental time-course for both audiovisual simultaneity judgment and rapid recalibration, with neither reaching maturity until well into adolescence. Interestingly, correlational analyses revealed that audiovisual simultaneity judgments (i.e., the size of the audiovisual temporal window of simultaneity) and rapid recalibration significantly co-varied as a function of age. Together, our results represent the most complete description of age-related changes in audiovisual simultaneity judgments to date, as well as being the first to describe changes in the degree of rapid recalibration as a function of age. We propose that the developmental time-course of rapid recalibration scaffolds the maturation of more durable audiovisual temporal representations.

  7. Theories of truth as assessment criteria in judgment and decision making

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Philip T. Dunwoody

    2009-03-01

    Full Text Available Hammond (1996 argued that much of the research in the field of judgment and decision making (JDM can be categorized as focused on either coherence or correspondence (CandC and that, in order to understand the findings of the field, one needs to understand the differences between these two criteria. extit{Hammond's claim} is that conclusions about the competence of judgments and decisions will depend upon the selection of coherence or correspondence as the criterion (Hammond, 2008. First, I provide an overview of the terms coherence and correspondence (CandC as philosophical theories of truth and relate them to the field of JDM. Second, I provide an example of Hammond's claim by examining literature on base rate neglect. Third, I examine Hammond's claim as it applies to the broader field of JDM. Fourth, I critique Hammond's claim and suggest that refinements to the CandC distinction are needed. Specifically, the CandC distinction 1 is more accurately applied to criteria than to researchers, 2 should be refined to include two important types of coherence (inter and intrapersonal coherence and 3 neglects the third philosophical theory of truth, pragmatism. Pragmatism, as a class of criteria in JDM, is defined as goal attainment. In order to provide the most complete assessment of human judgment possible, and understand different findings in the field of JDM, all three criteria should be considered.

  8. Neural Substrates of Similarity and Rule-based Strategies in Judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Bettina eVon Helversen

    2014-10-01

    Full Text Available Making accurate judgments is a core human competence and a prerequisite for success in many areas of life. Plenty of evidence exists that people can employ different judgment strategies to solve identical judgment problems. In categorization, it has been demonstrated that similarity-based and rule-based strategies are associated with activity in different brain regions. Building on this research, the present work tests whether solving two identical judgment problems recruits different neural substrates depending on people's judgment strategies. Combining cognitive modeling of judgment strategies at the behavioral level with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, we compare brain activity when using two archetypal judgment strategies: a similarity-based exemplar strategy and a rule-based heuristic strategy. Using an exemplar-based strategy should recruit areas involved in long-term memory processes to a larger extent than a heuristic strategy. In contrast, using a heuristic strategy should recruit areas involved in the application of rules to a larger extent than an exemplar-based strategy. Largely consistent with our hypotheses, we found that using an exemplar-based strategy led to relatively higher BOLD activity in the anterior prefrontal and inferior parietal cortex, presumably related to retrieval and selective attention processes. In contrast, using a heuristic strategy led to relatively higher activity in areas in the dorsolateral prefrontal and the temporal-parietal cortex associated with cognitive control and information integration. Thus, even when people solve identical judgment problems, different neural substrates can be recruited depending on the judgment strategy involved.

  9. Final Sampling Bias in Haptic Judgments: How Final Touch Affects Decision-Making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mitsuda, Takashi; Yoshioka, Yuichi

    2018-01-01

    When people make a choice between multiple items, they usually evaluate each item one after the other repeatedly. The effect of the order and number of evaluating items on one's choices is essential to understanding the decision-making process. Previous studies have shown that when people choose a favorable item from two items, they tend to choose the item that they evaluated last. This tendency has been observed regardless of sensory modalities. This study investigated the origin of this bias by using three experiments involving two-alternative forced-choice tasks using handkerchiefs. First, the bias appeared in a smoothness discrimination task, which indicates that the bias was not based on judgments of preference. Second, the handkerchief that was touched more often tended to be chosen more frequently in the preference task, but not in the smoothness discrimination task, indicating that a mere exposure effect enhanced the bias. Third, in the condition where the number of touches did not differ between handkerchiefs, the bias appeared when people touched a handkerchief they wanted to touch last, but not when people touched the handkerchief that was predetermined. This finding suggests a direct coupling between final voluntary touching and judgment.

  10. Intuition and Moral Decision-Making – The Effect of Time Pressure and Cognitive Load on Moral Judgment and Altruistic Behavior

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bonn, Caroline; Johannesson, Magnus; Kirchler, Michael; Koppel, Lina; Västfjäll, Daniel

    2016-01-01

    Do individuals intuitively favor certain moral actions over others? This study explores the role of intuitive thinking—induced by time pressure and cognitive load—in moral judgment and behavior. We conduct experiments in three different countries (Sweden, Austria, and the United States) involving over 1,400 subjects. All subjects responded to four trolley type dilemmas and four dictator games involving different charitable causes. Decisions were made under time pressure/time delay or while experiencing cognitive load or control. Overall we find converging evidence that intuitive states do not influence moral decisions. Neither time-pressure nor cognitive load had any effect on moral judgments or altruistic behavior. Thus we find no supporting evidence for the claim that intuitive moral judgments and dictator game giving differ from more reflectively taken decisions. Across all samples and decision tasks men were more likely to make utilitarian moral judgments and act selfishly compared to women, providing further evidence that there are robust gender differences in moral decision-making. However, there were no significant interactions between gender and the treatment manipulations of intuitive versus reflective decision-making. PMID:27783704

  11. Judgments Relative to Patterns: How Temporal Sequence Patterns Affect Judgments and Memory

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kusev, Petko; Ayton, Peter; van Schaik, Paul; Tsaneva-Atanasova, Krasimira; Stewart, Neil; Chater, Nick

    2011-01-01

    RESix experiments studied relative frequency judgment and recall of sequentially presented items drawn from 2 distinct categories (i.e., city and animal). The experiments show that judged frequencies of categories of sequentially encountered stimuli are affected by certain properties of the sequence configuration. We found (a) a "first-run…

  12. Stimulus repetition and the perception of time: the effects of prior exposure on temporal discrimination, judgment, and production.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    William J Matthews

    Full Text Available It has been suggested that repeated stimuli have shorter subjective duration than novel items, perhaps because of a reduction in the neural response to repeated presentations of the same object. Five experiments investigated the effects of repetition on time perception and found further evidence that immediate repetition reduces apparent duration, consistent with the idea that subjective duration is partly based on neural coding efficiency. In addition, the experiments found (a no effect of repetition on the precision of temporal discrimination, (b that the effects of repetition disappeared when there was a modest lag between presentations, (c that, across participants, the size of the repetition effect correlated with temporal discrimination, and (d that the effects of repetition suggested by a temporal production task were the opposite of those suggested by temporal judgments. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

  13. Section 3. General issues in management : Heuristics or experience-based techniques for making accounting judgments and learning

    OpenAIRE

    Schiller, Stefan

    2013-01-01

    The purpose of this paper is to further the development of initial accounting for internally generated intangible assets, relevant to both academics and practitioners, examining what happens when accountants are given principles-based discretion. This paper draws on existing insights into heuristics or experience-based techniques for making accounting judgments. Knowledge about judgment under uncertainty, and the general framework offered by the heuristics and biases program in particular, fo...

  14. Contingent capture effects in temporal order judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Born, Sabine; Kerzel, Dirk; Pratt, Jay

    2015-08-01

    The contingent attentional capture hypothesis proposes that visual stimuli that do not possess characteristics relevant for the current task will not capture attention, irrespective of their bottom-up saliency. Typically, contingent capture is tested in a spatial cuing paradigm, comparing manual reaction times (RTs) across different conditions. However, attention may act through several mechanisms and RTs may not be ideal to disentangle those different components. In 3 experiments, we examined whether color singleton cues provoke cuing effects in temporal order judgments (TOJs) and whether they would be contingent on attentional control sets. Experiment 1 showed that color singleton cues indeed produce cuing effects in TOJs, even in a cluttered and dynamic target display containing multiple heterogeneous distractors. In Experiment 2, consistent with contingent capture, we observed reliable cuing effects only when the singleton cue matched participants' current attentional control set. Experiment 3 suggests that a sensory interaction account of the differences found in Experiment 2 is unlikely. Our results help to discern the attentional components that may play a role in contingent capture. Further, we discuss a number of other effects (e.g., reversed cuing effects) that are found in RTs, but so far have not been reported in TOJs. Those differences suggest that RTs are influenced by a multitude of mechanisms; however, not all of these mechanisms may affect TOJs. We conclude by highlighting how the study of attentional capture in TOJs provides valuable insights for the attention literature, but also for studies concerned with the perceived timing between stimuli. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

  15. Improving moral judgments: philosophical considerations

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Kalis, A.

    2010-01-01

    In contemporary moral psychology, an often-heard claim is that knowing how we make moral judgments can help us make better moral judgments. Discussions about moral development and improvement are often framed in terms of the question of which mental processes have a better chance of leading to good

  16. Effectiveness of a theoretically-based judgment and decision making intervention for adolescents.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Knight, Danica K; Dansereau, Donald F; Becan, Jennifer E; Rowan, Grace A; Flynn, Patrick M

    2015-05-01

    Although adolescents demonstrate capacity for rational decision making, their tendency to be impulsive, place emphasis on peers, and ignore potential consequences of their actions often translates into higher risk-taking including drug use, illegal activity, and physical harm. Problems with judgment and decision making contribute to risky behavior and are core issues for youth in treatment. Based on theoretical and empirical advances in cognitive science, the Treatment Readiness and Induction Program (TRIP) represents a curriculum-based decision making intervention that can be easily inserted into a variety of content-oriented modalities as well as administered as a separate therapeutic course. The current study examined the effectiveness of TRIP for promoting better judgment among 519 adolescents (37 % female; primarily Hispanic and Caucasian) in residential substance abuse treatment. Change over time in decision making and premeditation (i.e., thinking before acting) was compared among youth receiving standard operating practice (n = 281) versus those receiving standard practice plus TRIP (n = 238). Change in TRIP-specific content knowledge was examined among clients receiving TRIP. Premeditation improved among youth in both groups; TRIP clients showed greater improvement in decision making. TRIP clients also reported significant increases over time in self-awareness, positive-focused thinking (e.g., positive self-talk, goal setting), and recognition of the negative effects of drug use. While both genders showed significant improvement, males showed greater gains in metacognitive strategies (i.e., awareness of one's own cognitive process) and recognition of the negative effects of drug use. These results suggest that efforts to teach core thinking strategies and apply/practice them through independent intervention modules may benefit adolescents when used in conjunction with content-based programs designed to change problematic behaviors.

  17. How Reasoning, Judgment, and Decision Making are Colored by Gist-based Intuition: A Fuzzy-Trace Theory Approach.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Corbin, Jonathan C; Reyna, Valerie F; Weldon, Rebecca B; Brainerd, Charles J

    2015-12-01

    Fuzzy-trace theory distinguishes verbatim (literal, exact) from gist (meaningful) representations, predicting that reliance on gist increases with experience and expertise. Thus, many judgment-and-decision-making biases increase with development, such that cognition is colored by context in ways that violate logical coherence and probability theories. Nevertheless, this increase in gist-based intuition is adaptive: Gist is stable, less sensitive to interference, and easier to manipulate. Moreover, gist captures the functionally significant essence of information, supporting healthier and more robust decision processes. We describe how fuzzy-trace theory accounts for judgment-and-decision making phenomena, predicting the paradoxical arc of these processes with the development of experience and expertise. We present data linking gist memory processes to gist processing in decision making and provide illustrations of gist reliance in medicine, public health, and intelligence analysis.

  18. Comparing temporal order judgments and choice reaction time tasks as indices of exogenous spatial cuing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Eskes, Gail A; Klein, Raymond M; Dove, Mary Beth; Coolican, Jamesie; Shore, David I

    2007-11-30

    Attentional disorders are common in individuals with neurological or psychiatric conditions and impact on recovery and outcome. Thus, it is critical to develop theory-based measures of attentional function to understand potential mechanisms underlying the disorder and to evaluate the effect of intervention. The present study compared two alternative methods to measure the effects of attentional cuing that could be used in populations of individuals who may not be able to make manual responses normally or may show overall slowing in responses. Spatial attention was measured with speeded and unspeeded methods using either manual or voice responses in two standard attention paradigms: the cued target discrimination reaction time (RT) paradigm and the unspeeded temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. The comparison of speeded and unspeeded tasks specifically addresses the concern about interpreting RT differences between cued and uncued trials (taken as a proxy for attention) in the context of drastically different baseline RTs. We found significant cuing effects for both tasks (speeded RT and untimed TOJ) and both response types (vocal and manual) giving clinicians and researchers alternative methods with which to measure the effects of attention in different populations who may not be able to perform the standard speeded RT task.

  19. Brain correlates of aesthetic judgment of beauty.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jacobsen, Thomas; Schubotz, Ricarda I; Höfel, Lea; Cramon, D Yves V

    2006-01-01

    Functional MRI was used to investigate the neural correlates of aesthetic judgments of beauty of geometrical shapes. Participants performed evaluative aesthetic judgments (beautiful or not?) and descriptive symmetry judgments (symmetric or not?) on the same stimulus material. Symmetry was employed because aesthetic judgments are known to be often guided by criteria of symmetry. Novel, abstract graphic patterns were presented to minimize influences of attitudes or memory-related processes and to test effects of stimulus symmetry and complexity. Behavioral results confirmed the influence of stimulus symmetry and complexity on aesthetic judgments. Direct contrasts showed specific activations for aesthetic judgments in the frontomedian cortex (BA 9/10), bilateral prefrontal BA 45/47, and posterior cingulate, left temporal pole, and the temporoparietal junction. In contrast, symmetry judgments elicited specific activations in parietal and premotor areas subserving spatial processing. Interestingly, beautiful judgments enhanced BOLD signals not only in the frontomedian cortex, but also in the left intraparietal sulcus of the symmetry network. Moreover, stimulus complexity caused differential effects for each of the two judgment types. Findings indicate aesthetic judgments of beauty to rely on a network partially overlapping with that underlying evaluative judgments on social and moral cues and substantiate the significance of symmetry and complexity for our judgment of beauty.

  20. Influence diagram in evaluating the subjective judgment

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Hong, Y.

    1997-01-01

    The author developed the idea of the subjective influence diagrams to evaluate subjective judgment. The subjective judgment of a stake holder is a primary decision making proposition. It involves a basic decision process an the individual attitude of the stake holder for his decision purpose. The subjective judgment dominates the some final decisions. A complex decision process may include the subjective judgment. An influence diagram framework is a simplest tool for analyzing subjective judgment process. In the framework, the characters of influence diagrams generate the describing the analyzing, and the evaluating of the subjective judgment. The relationship between the information and the decision, such as independent character between them, is the main issue. Then utility function is the calculating tool to evaluation, the stake holder can make optimal decision. Through the analysis about the decision process and relationship, the building process of the influence diagram identically describes the subjective judgment. Some examples are given to explain the property of subjective judgment and the analysis process

  1. Surprise, Memory, and Retrospective Judgment Making: Testing Cognitive Reconstruction Theories of the Hindsight Bias Effect

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ash, Ivan K.

    2009-01-01

    Hindsight bias has been shown to be a pervasive and potentially harmful decision-making bias. A review of 4 competing cognitive reconstruction theories of hindsight bias revealed conflicting predictions about the role and effect of expectation or surprise in retrospective judgment formation. Two experiments tested these predictions examining the…

  2. Atypical temporal activation pattern and central-right brain compensation during semantic judgment task in children with early left brain damage.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chang, Yi-Tzu; Lin, Shih-Che; Meng, Ling-Fu; Fan, Yang-Teng

    In this study we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) during the semantic judgment task (deciding if the two Chinese characters were semantically related or unrelated) to identify the timing of neural activation in children with early left brain damage (ELBD). The results demonstrated that compared with the controls, children with ELBD had (1) competitive accuracy and reaction time in the semantic judgment task, (2) weak operation of the N400, (3) stronger, earlier and later compensational positivities (referred to the enhanced P200, P250, and P600 amplitudes) in the central and right region of the brain to successfully engage in semantic judgment. Our preliminary findings indicate that temporally postlesional reorganization is in accordance with the proposed right-hemispheric organization of speech after early left-sided brain lesion. During semantic processing, the orthography has a greater effect on the children with ELBD, and a later semantic reanalysis (P600) is required due to the less efficient N400 at the former stage for semantic integration. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  3. Inability and Obligation in Moral Judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Buckwalter, Wesley; Turri, John

    2015-01-01

    It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral vocabulary to probe moral judgments and was insensitive to different levels of seriousness for the consequences of inaction (Experiment 4). Judgments about moral obligation were no different for individuals who can or cannot perform physical actions, and these judgments differed from evaluations of a non-moral obligation (Experiment 7). Together these results demonstrate that commonsense morality rejects the “ought implies can” principle for moral requirements, and that judgments about moral obligation are made independently of considerations about ability. By contrast, judgments of blame were highly sensitive to considerations about ability (Experiment 8), which suggests that commonsense morality might accept a “blame implies can” principle. PMID:26296206

  4. Judgment, Probability, and Aristotle's Rhetoric.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Warnick, Barbara

    1989-01-01

    Discusses Aristotle's five means of making judgments: intelligence, "episteme" (scientific knowledge), "sophia" (theoretical wisdom), "techne" (art), and "phronesis" (practical wisdom). Sets Aristotle's theory of rhetorical argument within the context of his overall view of human judgment. Notes that…

  5. An Integrative Process Approach on Judgment and Decision Making: The Impact of Arousal, Affect, Motivation, and Cognitive Ability

    Science.gov (United States)

    Roets, Arne; Van Hiel, Alain

    2011-01-01

    This article aims to integrate the findings from various research traditions on human judgment and decision making, focusing on four process variables: arousal, affect, motivation, and cognitive capacity/ability. We advocate a broad perspective referred to as the integrative process approach (IPA) of decision making, in which these process…

  6. True and False Memories, Parietal Cortex, and Confidence Judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Urgolites, Zhisen J.; Smith, Christine N.; Squire, Larry R.

    2015-01-01

    Recent studies have asked whether activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and the neocortex can distinguish true memory from false memory. A frequent complication has been that the confidence associated with correct memory judgments (true memory) is typically higher than the confidence associated with incorrect memory judgments (false memory).…

  7. The Relationship between Moral Decision Making and Patterns of Consolidation and Transition in Moral Judgment Development.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Thoma, Stephen J.; Rest, James R.

    1999-01-01

    Assessed the relationship between a measure of consolidation and transition in moral-judgment development and utility of moral concepts in sociomoral decision making in multiple cross-sectional and longitudinal samples. Found that participants' reliance on a Kohlbergian moral framework was highest during periods of consolidation and lowest during…

  8. Research on Judgment Aggregation Based on Logic

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Li Dai

    2014-05-01

    Full Text Available Preference aggregation and judgment aggregation are two basic research models of group decision making. And preference aggregation has been deeply studied in social choice theory. However, researches of social choice theory gradually focus on judgment aggregation which appears recently. Judgment aggregation focuses on how to aggregate many consistent logical formulas into one, from the perspective of logic. We try to start with judgment aggregation model based on logic and then explore different solutions to problem of judgment aggregation.

  9. What makes moral dilemma judgments "utilitarian" or "deontological"?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gawronski, Bertram; Beer, Jennifer S

    2017-12-01

    The distinction between utilitarianism and deontology has become a prevailing framework for conceptualizing moral judgment. According to the principle of utilitarianism, the morality of an action depends on its outcomes. In contrast, the principle of deontology states that the morality of an action depends on its consistency with moral norms. To identify the processes underlying utilitarian and deontological judgments, research in psychology and neuroscience has investigated responses to moral dilemmas that pit one principle against the other (e.g., trolley dilemma). However, the interpretation of responses in this paradigm is ambiguous, because the defining aspects of utilitarianism and deontology, outcomes and norms, are not manipulated. We illustrate how this shortcoming distorts interpretations of empirical findings and describe an alternative approach that overcomes the limitations of the traditional paradigm.

  10. Does ADHD in adults affect the relative accuracy of metamemory judgments?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Knouse, Laura E; Paradise, Matthew J; Dunlosky, John

    2006-11-01

    Prior research suggests that individuals with ADHD overestimate their performance across domains despite performing more poorly in these domains. The authors introduce measures of accuracy from the larger realm of judgment and decision making--namely, relative accuracy and calibration--to the study of self-evaluative judgment accuracy in adults with ADHD. Twenty-eight adults with ADHD and 28 matched controls participate in a computer-administered paired-associate learning task and predict their future recall using immediate and delayed judgments of learning (JOLs). Retrospective confidence judgments are also collected. Groups perform equally in terms of judgment magnitude and absolute judgment accuracy as measured by discrepancy scores and calibration curves. Both groups benefit equally from making their JOL at a delay, and the group with ADHD show higher relative accuracy for delayed judgments. Results suggest that under certain circumstances, adults with ADHD can make accurate judgments about their future memory.

  11. Known Unknowns in Judgment and Choice

    OpenAIRE

    Walters, Daniel

    2017-01-01

    This dissertation investigates how people make inferences about missing information. Whereas most prior literature focuses on how people process known information, I show that the extent to which people make inferences about missing information impacts judgments and choices. Specifically, I investigate how (1) awareness of known unknowns affects overconfidence in judgment in Chapter 1, (2) beliefs about the knowability of unknowns impacts investment strategies in Chapter 2, and (3) inferences...

  12. Assessment of moral judgment and empathy in young sex offenders: a comparison of clinical judgment and test results.

    Science.gov (United States)

    van Vugt, Eveline; Asscher, Jessica; Hendriks, Jan; Stams, Geert Jan; Bijleveld, Catrien; van der Laan, Peter

    2012-10-01

    Professional decision making in forensic clinical practice may have lifelong consequences for offenders. Although information on moral development is important for prediction of reoffending and referral to adequate treatment, conclusions regarding moral development are still largely based on unstructured clinical judgment instead of assessment instruments. For this study, the authors examined to what extent unstructured clinical judgment of both moral judgment and victim empathy concurred with test results in a group of young sex offenders. Moral judgment was measured with the Sociomoral Reflection Measure-Short Form (SRM-SF), whereas victim empathy was measured with an extended version of the Basic Empathy Scale (BES). No significant associations were found between clinical judgment of moral judgment and the mean scores on the SRM-SF. However, clinical judgment of victim empathy was significantly associated with victim empathy on the Victim Empathy Scale but not consistently in the expected direction. Juvenile sex offenders, who were judged by clinicians to show little victim empathy, displayed lower mean scores on the Victim Empathy Scale than juvenile sex offenders who were evaluated to lack victim empathy or to have intact victim empathy. This study showed unstructured clinical judgment of moral development not to concur with test results. To improve decision-making processes regarding moral development, clinicians are advised to rely on instruments that assess moral development to inform clinical judgment. Further research is needed to examine which predictions are more accurate and to establish the predictive validity of moral development evaluations.

  13. 32 CFR 37.225 - What judgment must I make about the benefits of using a TIA?

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... using a TIA? 37.225 Section 37.225 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF... Investment Agreements § 37.225 What judgment must I make about the benefits of using a TIA? Before deciding that a TIA is appropriate, you also must judge that using a TIA could benefit defense research...

  14. Clinical judgment, moral anxiety, and the limits of psychiatry.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Murray, Bradley

    2017-12-01

    It is common for clinicians working in psychiatry and related clinical disciplines to be called on to make diagnostic clinical judgments concerning moral anxiety, which is a kind of anxiety that is closely bound up with decisions individuals face as moral agents. To make such a judgment, it is necessary to make a moral judgment. Although it has been common to acknowledge that there are ways in which moral and clinical judgment interact, this type of interaction has remained unacknowledged. This raises questions as to the nature and limits of psychiatry-particularly concerning the extent to which psychiatric discourse ought to incorporate moral discourse, and the role of the clinician as an expert in identifying problematic anxiety.

  15. Do changes in the pace of events affect one-off judgments of duration?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Darlow, Hannah M; Dylman, Alexandra S; Gheorghiu, Ana I; Matthews, William J

    2013-01-01

    Five experiments examined whether changes in the pace of external events influence people's judgments of duration. In Experiments 1a-1c, participants heard pieces of music whose tempo accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 2, participants completed a visuo-motor task in which the rate of stimulus presentation accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 3, participants completed a reading task in which facts appeared on-screen at accelerating, decelerating, or constant rates. In all experiments, the physical duration of the to-be-judged interval was the same across conditions. We found no significant effects of temporal structure on duration judgments in any of the experiments, either when participants knew that a time estimate would be required (prospective judgments) or when they did not (retrospective judgments). These results provide a starting point for the investigation of how temporal structure affects one-off judgments of duration like those typically made in natural settings.

  16. Do changes in the pace of events affect one-off judgments of duration?

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Hannah M Darlow

    Full Text Available Five experiments examined whether changes in the pace of external events influence people's judgments of duration. In Experiments 1a-1c, participants heard pieces of music whose tempo accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 2, participants completed a visuo-motor task in which the rate of stimulus presentation accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 3, participants completed a reading task in which facts appeared on-screen at accelerating, decelerating, or constant rates. In all experiments, the physical duration of the to-be-judged interval was the same across conditions. We found no significant effects of temporal structure on duration judgments in any of the experiments, either when participants knew that a time estimate would be required (prospective judgments or when they did not (retrospective judgments. These results provide a starting point for the investigation of how temporal structure affects one-off judgments of duration like those typically made in natural settings.

  17. Individual differences in first- and second-order temporal judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Corcoran, Andrew W; Groot, Christopher; Bruno, Aurelio; Johnston, Alan; Cropper, Simon J

    2018-01-01

    The ability of subjects to identify and reproduce brief temporal intervals is influenced by many factors whether they be stimulus-based, task-based or subject-based. The current study examines the role individual differences play in subsecond and suprasecond timing judgments, using the schizoptypy personality scale as a test-case approach for quantifying a broad range of individual differences. In two experiments, 129 (Experiment 1) and 141 (Experiment 2) subjects completed the O-LIFE personality questionnaire prior to performing a modified temporal-bisection task. In the bisection task, subjects responded to two identical instantiations of a luminance grating presented in a 4deg window, 4deg above fixation for 1.5 s (Experiment 1) or 3 s (Experiment 2). Subjects initiated presentation with a button-press, and released the button when they considered the stimulus to be half-way through (750/1500 ms). Subjects were then asked to indicate their 'most accurate estimate' of the two intervals. In this way we measure both performance on the task (a first-order measure) and the subjects' knowledge of their performance (a second-order measure). In Experiment 1 the effect of grating-drift and feedback on performance was also examined. Experiment 2 focused on the static/no-feedback condition. For the group data, Experiment 1 showed a significant effect of presentation order in the baseline condition (no feedback), which disappeared when feedback was provided. Moving the stimulus had no effect on perceived duration. Experiment 2 showed no effect of stimulus presentation order. This elimination of the subsecond order-effect was at the expense of accuracy, as the mid-point of the suprasecond interval was generally underestimated. Response precision increased as a proportion of total duration, reducing the variance below that predicted by Weber's law. This result is consistent with a breakdown of the scalar properties of time perception in the early suprasecond range. All

  18. Why doesn't a family member of a person with advanced dementia use a substituted judgment when making a decision for that person?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hirschman, Karen B; Kapo, Jennifer M; Karlawish, Jason H T

    2006-08-01

    The objective of this study was to identify what standard of decision making a family member uses when making medical decisions for their relative with advanced dementia. Thirty family members of patients with advanced dementia from an Alzheimer disease center and a suburban long-term care facility were interviewed using a semistructured interview. All interviews were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed using qualitative data analysis techniques. Family members were split almost evenly in the standard they used when making medical decisions for their relative: substituted judgment (43%) or best interests (57%). However, few who used the substituted judgment standard viewed it as distinct from best interests. Instead, both standards were taken into consideration when making medical decisions. In addition to not having discussions about healthcare preferences, the reasons for not using a substituted judgment included: the need for family consensus, unrealistic expectations of the patient, the need to incorporate their relative's quality of life into the decision, and the influence of healthcare professionals. Family members who did not have discussions about healthcare preferences identified various barriers to the discussion, including waiting too long, avoiding the topic, and the patient's denial of dementia. These data suggest several reasons why surrogate decision-makers for persons with advanced dementia do not use the substituted judgment standard and the potential value of interventions that would allow patients with early-stage dementia and their family members to discuss healthcare preferences.

  19. Heuristic reasoning and cognitive biases: Are they hindrances to judgments and decision making in orthodontics?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hicks, E Preston; Kluemper, G Thomas

    2011-03-01

    Studies show that our brains use 2 modes of reasoning: heuristic (intuitive, automatic, implicit processing) and analytic (deliberate, rule-based, explicit processing). The use of intuition often dominates problem solving when innovative, creative thinking is required. Under conditions of uncertainty, we default to an even greater reliance on the heuristic processing. In health care settings and other such environments of increased importance, this mode becomes problematic. Since choice heuristics are quickly constructed from fragments of memory, they are often biased by prior evaluations of and preferences for the alternatives being considered. Therefore, a rigorous and systematic decision process notwithstanding, clinical judgments under uncertainty are often flawed by a number of unwitting biases. Clinical orthodontics is as vulnerable to this fundamental failing in the decision-making process as any other health care discipline. Several of the more common cognitive biases relevant to clinical orthodontics are discussed in this article. By raising awareness of these sources of cognitive errors in our clinical decision making, our intent was to equip the clinician to take corrective action to avoid them. Our secondary goal was to expose this important area of empirical research and encourage those with expertise in the cognitive sciences to explore, through further research, the possible relevance and impact of cognitive heuristics and biases on the accuracy of orthodontic judgments and decision making. Copyright © 2011 American Association of Orthodontists. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

  20. Moral judgment in episodic amnesia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Craver, Carl F; Keven, Nazim; Kwan, Donna; Kurczek, Jake; Duff, Melissa C; Rosenbaum, R Shayna

    2016-08-01

    To investigate the role of episodic thought about the past and future in moral judgment, we administered a well-established moral judgment battery to individuals with hippocampal damage and deficits in episodic thought (insert Greene et al. 2001). Healthy controls select deontological answers in high-conflict moral scenarios more frequently when they vividly imagine themselves in the scenarios than when they imagine scenarios abstractly, at some personal remove. If this bias is mediated by episodic thought, individuals with deficits in episodic thought should not exhibit this effect. We report that individuals with deficits in episodic memory and future thought make moral judgments and exhibit the biasing effect of vivid, personal imaginings on moral judgment. These results strongly suggest that the biasing effect of vivid personal imagining on moral judgment is not due to episodic thought about the past and future. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  1. Neural Correlates of Causal Power Judgments

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Denise Dellarosa Cummins

    2014-12-01

    Full Text Available Causal inference is a fundamental component of cognition and perception. Probabilistic theories of causal judgment (most notably causal Bayes networks derive causal judgments using metrics that integrate contingency information. But human estimates typically diverge from these normative predictions. This is because human causal power judgments are typically strongly influenced by beliefs concerning underlying causal mechanisms, and because of the way knowledge is retrieved from human memory during the judgment process. Neuroimaging studies indicate that the brain distinguishes causal events from mere covariation, and between perceived and inferred causality. Areas involved in error prediction are also activated, implying automatic activation of possible exception cases during causal decision-making.

  2. Debiasing Health-Related Judgments and Decision Making: A Systematic Review.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ludolph, Ramona; Schulz, Peter J

    2018-01-01

    Being confronted with uncertainty in the context of health-related judgments and decision making can give rise to the occurrence of systematic biases. These biases may detrimentally affect lay persons and health experts alike. Debiasing aims at mitigating these negative effects by eliminating or reducing the biases. However, little is known about its effectiveness. This study seeks to systematically review the research on health-related debiasing to identify new opportunities and challenges for successful debiasing strategies. A systematic search resulted in 2748 abstracts eligible for screening. Sixty-eight articles reporting 87 relevant studies met the predefined inclusion criteria and were categorized and analyzed with regard to content and quality. All steps were undertaken independently by 2 reviewers, and inconsistencies were resolved through discussion. The majority of debiasing interventions ( n = 60) was at least partially successful. Optimistic biases ( n = 25), framing effects ( n = 14), and base rate neglects ( n = 10) were the main targets of debiasing efforts. Cognitive strategies ( n = 36) such as "consider-the-opposite" and technological interventions ( n = 33) such as visual aids were mainly tested. Thirteen studies aimed at debiasing health care professionals' judgments, while 74 interventions addressed the general population. Studies' methodological quality ranged from 26.2% to 92.9%, with an average rating of 68.7%. In the past, the usefulness of debiasing was often debated. Yet most of the interventions reviewed here are found to be effective, pointing to the utility of debiasing in the health context. In particular, technological strategies offer a novel opportunity to pursue large-scale debiasing outside the laboratory. The need to strengthen the transfer of debiasing interventions to real-life settings and a lack of conceptual rigor are identified as the main challenges requiring further research.

  3. Temporal decision-making: insights from cognitive neuroscience

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Christian C Luhmann

    2009-10-01

    Full Text Available Decisions frequently have consequences that play out over time and these temporal factors can exert strong influences on behavior. For example, decision-makers exhibit delay discounting, behaving as though immediately consumable goods are more valuable than those available only after some delay. With the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, we are now beginning to characterize the physiological bases of such behavior in humans and to link work on this topic from neuroscience, psychology, and economics. Here we review recent neurocognitive investigations of temporal decision-making and outline the theoretical picture that is beginning to take shape. Taken as a whole, this body of work illustrates the progress made in understanding temporal choice behavior. However, we also note several questions that remain unresolved and areas where future work is needed.

  4. Original and Derived Judgment

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Foss, Kirsten; Foss, Nicolai Juul; Klein, Peter G.

    2007-01-01

    Recent work links entrepreneurship to the economic theory of the firm, using the concept of entrepreneurship as judgment introduced by Frank Knight. When judgment is complementary to other assets, it makes sense for entrepreneurs to hire labour and to own assets. The entrepreneur's role, then...... to subordinates, who exercise derived judgment. We call these employees `proxy-entrepreneurs', and ask how the firm's organizational structure - its formal and informal systems of rewards and punishments, rules for settling disputes and renegotiating agreements, means of evaluating performance and so on - can...... be designed to encourage forms of proxy entrepreneurship that increase firm value while discouraging actions that destroy value. Building on key ideas from the entrepreneurship literature, Austrian economics and the economic theory of the firm, we develop a framework for analysing the trade-off between...

  5. The temporal dynamics of speeded decision making

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Dutilh, G.

    2012-01-01

    This dissertation sheds light on the temporal dynamics of behavior in speeded decision making. Participants on reaction time (RT) tasks learn, get distracted, speed up, slow down, get confused, get bored, and eventually may start guessing. One can safely say that participants' behavior is dynamic.

  6. The development of intent-based moral judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cushman, Fiery; Sheketoff, Rachel; Wharton, Sophie; Carey, Susan

    2013-04-01

    Between the ages of 4 and 8 children increasingly make moral judgments on the basis of an actor's intent, as opposed to the outcome that the actor brings about. Does this reflect a reorganization of concepts in the moral domain, or simply the development of capacities outside the moral domain such as theory of mind and executive function? Motivated by the past evidence that adults rely partially on outcome-based judgment for judgments of deserved punishment, but not for judgments of moral wrongness, we explore the same categories of judgment in young children. We find that intent-based judgments emerge first in children's assessments of naughtiness and that this subsequently constrains their judgments of deserved punishment. We also find that this developmental trajectory differs for judgments of accidental harm (a bad outcome with benign intent) and judgments of attempted harm (a benign outcome with bad intent). Our findings support a two process model derived from studies of adults: a mental-state based process of judging wrongness constrains an outcome-based process of assigning punishment. The emergence of this two-process architecture in childhood suggests that the developmental shift from outcome- to intent-based judgment involves a conceptual reorganization within the moral domain. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  7. Impaired perception of temporal fine structure and musical timbre in cochlear implant users.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Heng, Joseph; Cantarero, Gabriela; Elhilali, Mounya; Limb, Charles J

    2011-10-01

    Cochlear implant (CI) users demonstrate severe limitations in perceiving musical timbre, a psychoacoustic feature of sound responsible for 'tone color' and one's ability to identify a musical instrument. The reasons for this limitation remain poorly understood. In this study, we sought to examine the relative contributions of temporal envelope and fine structure for timbre judgments, in light of the fact that speech processing strategies employed by CI systems typically employ envelope extraction algorithms. We synthesized "instrumental chimeras" that systematically combined variable amounts of envelope and fine structure in 25% increments from two different source instruments with either sustained or percussive envelopes. CI users and normal hearing (NH) subjects were presented with 150 chimeras and asked to determine which instrument the chimera more closely resembled in a single-interval two-alternative forced choice task. By combining instruments with similar and dissimilar envelopes, we controlled the valence of envelope for timbre identification and compensated for envelope reconstruction from fine structure information. Our results show that NH subjects utilize envelope and fine structure interchangeably, whereas CI subjects demonstrate overwhelming reliance on temporal envelope. When chimeras were created from dissimilar envelope instrument pairs, NH subjects utilized a combination of envelope (p = 0.008) and fine structure information (p = 0.009) to make timbre judgments. In contrast, CI users utilized envelope information almost exclusively to make timbre judgments (p < 0.001) and ignored fine structure information (p = 0.908). Interestingly, when the value of envelope as a cue was reduced, both NH subjects and CI users utilized fine structure information to make timbre judgments (p < 0.001), although the effect was quite weak in CI users. Our findings confirm that impairments in fine structure processing underlie poor perception of musical timbre in CI

  8. Improving a gold standard: treating human relevance judgments of MEDLINE document pairs

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Kim Won

    2011-06-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Given prior human judgments of the condition of an object it is possible to use these judgments to make a maximal likelihood estimate of what future human judgments of the condition of that object will be. However, if one has a reasonably large collection of similar objects and the prior human judgments of a number of judges regarding the condition of each object in the collection, then it is possible to make predictions of future human judgments for the whole collection that are superior to the simple maximal likelihood estimate for each object in isolation. This is possible because the multiple judgments over the collection allow an analysis to determine the relative value of a judge as compared with the other judges in the group and this value can be used to augment or diminish a particular judge’s influence in predicting future judgments. Here we study and compare five different methods for making such improved predictions and show that each is superior to simple maximal likelihood estimates.

  9. Motivation and Affective Judgments Differentially Recruit Neurons in the Primate Dorsolateral Prefrontal and Anterior Cingulate Cortex

    Science.gov (United States)

    Amemori, Ken-ichi; Amemori, Satoko

    2015-01-01

    The judgment of whether to accept or to reject an offer is determined by positive and negative affect related to the offer, but affect also induces motivational responses. Rewarding and aversive cues influence the firing rates of many neurons in primate prefrontal and cingulate neocortical regions, but it still is unclear whether neurons in these regions are related to affective judgment or to motivation. To address this issue, we recorded simultaneously the neuronal spike activities of single units in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of macaque monkeys as they performed approach–avoidance (Ap–Av) and approach–approach (Ap–Ap) decision-making tasks that can behaviorally dissociate affective judgment and motivation. Notably, neurons having activity correlated with motivational condition could be distinguished from neurons having activity related to affective judgment, especially in the Ap–Av task. Although many neurons in both regions exhibited similar, selective patterns of task-related activity, we found a larger proportion of neurons activated in low motivational conditions in the dlPFC than in the ACC, and the onset of this activity was significantly earlier in the dlPFC than in the ACC. Furthermore, the temporal onsets of affective judgment represented by neuronal activities were significantly slower in the low motivational conditions than in the other conditions. These findings suggest that motivation and affective judgment both recruit dlPFC and ACC neurons but with differential degrees of involvement and timing. PMID:25653353

  10. Probability judgments under ambiguity and conflict.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Smithson, Michael

    2015-01-01

    Whether conflict and ambiguity are distinct kinds of uncertainty remains an open question, as does their joint impact on judgments of overall uncertainty. This paper reviews recent advances in our understanding of human judgment and decision making when both ambiguity and conflict are present, and presents two types of testable models of judgments under conflict and ambiguity. The first type concerns estimate-pooling to arrive at "best" probability estimates. The second type is models of subjective assessments of conflict and ambiguity. These models are developed for dealing with both described and experienced information. A framework for testing these models in the described-information setting is presented, including a reanalysis of a multi-nation data-set to test best-estimate models, and a study of participants' assessments of conflict, ambiguity, and overall uncertainty reported by Smithson (2013). A framework for research in the experienced-information setting is then developed, that differs substantially from extant paradigms in the literature. This framework yields new models of "best" estimates and perceived conflict. The paper concludes with specific suggestions for future research on judgment and decision making under conflict and ambiguity.

  11. Religiosity and agency and communion: their relationship to religious judgmentalism.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Beck, R; Miller, C D

    2000-05-01

    The present study is an introduction to the construct of religious judgmentalism, defined as a willingness to make religious or moral judgments of others based on a limited period of observation; the study offers a prediction about which individuals will engage in such judgmental behavior. It was predicted that agency motives would significantly predict religious judgmentalism in a religious population but that communion motives and intrinsic religiosity would moderate this effect. Overall, the findings supported these predictions. Agency motives were positively correlated with religious judgmentalism. Intrinsic religiosity predicted a general unwillingness to make religious evaluations of others. Both intrinsic religiosity and communion motives did moderate the effects of high agency motives. Specifically, increases in communion motive and intrinsic religiosity, at high levels of agency motives, significantly predicted lower scores for religious judgmentalism. These findings were conceptualized as preliminary evidence for the position that interpersonal motives, rather than religiousness or religious motivation, predict social intolerance and criticism in religious individuals.

  12. Personality judgments from everyday images of faces

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Clare AM Sutherland

    2015-10-01

    Full Text Available People readily make personality attributions to images of strangers’ faces. Here we investigated the basis of these personality attributions as made to everyday, naturalistic face images. In a first study, we used 1,000 highly varying ‘ambient image’ face photographs to test the correspondence between personality judgments of the Big Five and dimensions known to underlie a range of facial first impressions: approachability, dominance and youthful-attractiveness. Interestingly, the facial Big Five judgments were found to separate to some extent: judgments of openness, extraversion, emotional stability and agreeableness were mainly linked to facial first impressions of approachability, whereas conscientiousness judgments involved a combination of approachability and dominance. In a second study we used average face images to investigate which main cues are used by perceivers to make impressions of the Big Five, by extracting consistent cues to impressions from the large variation in the original images. When forming impressions of strangers from highly varying, naturalistic face photographs, perceivers mainly seem to rely on broad facial cues to approachability, such as smiling.

  13. Future versus present: time perspective and pupillary response in a relatedness judgment task investigating temporal event knowledge.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nowack, Kati; Milfont, Taciano L; van der Meer, Elke

    2013-02-01

    Mental representations of events contain many components such as typical agents, instruments, objects as well as a temporal dimension that is directed towards the future. While the role of temporal orientation (chronological, reverse) in event knowledge has been demonstrated by numerous studies, little is known about the influence of time perspective (present or future) as source of individual differences affecting event knowledge. The present study combined behavioral data with task-evoked pupil dilation to examine the impact of time perspective on cognitive resource allocation. In a relatedness judgment task, everyday events like raining were paired with an object feature like wet. Chronological items were processed more easily than reverse items regardless of time perspective. When more automatic processes were applied, greater scores on future time perspective were associated with lower error rates for chronological items. This suggests that a match between a strong focus on future consequences and items with a temporal orientation directed toward the future serves to enhance responding accuracy. Indexed by pupillary data, future-oriented participants invested more cognitive resources while outperforming present-oriented participants in reaction times across all conditions. This result was supported by a principal component analysis on the pupil data, which demonstrated the same impact of time perspective on the factor associated with more general aspects of cognitive effort. These findings suggest that future time perspective may be linked to a more general cognitive performance characteristic that improves overall task performance. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  14. Do social utility judgments influence attentional processing?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shore, Danielle M; Heerey, Erin A

    2013-10-01

    Research shows that social judgments influence decision-making in social environments. For example, judgments about an interaction partners' trustworthiness affect a variety of social behaviors and decisions. One mechanism by which social judgments may influence social decisions is by biasing the automatic allocation of attention toward certain social partners, thereby shaping the information people acquire. Using an attentional blink paradigm, we investigate how trustworthiness judgments alter the allocation of attention to social stimuli in a set of two experiments. The first experiment investigates trustworthiness judgments based solely on a social partner's facial appearance. The second experiment examines the effect of trustworthiness judgments based on experienced behavior. In the first, strong appearance-based judgments (positive and negative) enhanced stimulus recognizability but did not alter the size of the attentional blink, suggesting that appearance-based social judgments enhance face memory but do not affect pre-attentive processing. However, in the second experiment, in which judgments were based on behavioral experience rather than appearance, positive judgments enhanced pre-attentive processing of trustworthy faces. This suggests that a stimulus's potential benefits, rather than its disadvantages, shape the automatic distribution of attentional resources. These results have implications for understanding how appearance- and behavior-based social cues shape attention distribution in social environments. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  15. Implicit Bias in Judicial Decision Making How It Affects Judgment and What Judges Can Do About It

    OpenAIRE

    Wistrich, Andrew; Rachlinski, Jeffrey

    2017-01-01

    This Chapter reviews research indicating that judges, like most adults, rely too heavily on intuition while making important decisions. This tendency leaves them vulnerable to using overly simplistic cognitive strategies to decide cases, which creates predictable, systematic errors in judgment. It can also facilitate a reliance on implicit race and gender biases while deciding cases. Numerous strategies are available that would allow judges to stop and deliberate more carefully. This Chapter ...

  16. Frontopolar and anterior temporal cortex activation in a moral judgment task: preliminary functional MRI results in normal subjects Ativação do córtex frontopolar e temporal anterior em uma tarefa de julgamento moral: resultados preliminares de ressonância magnética funcional em indivíduos normais

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jorge Moll

    2001-09-01

    Full Text Available OBJECTIVE: To study the brain areas which are activated when normal subjects make moral judgments. METHOD: Ten normal adults underwent BOLD functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI during the auditory presentation of sentences that they were instructed to silently judge as either "right" or "wrong". Half of the sentences had an explicit moral content ("We break the law when necessary", the other half comprised factual statements devoid of moral connotation ("Stones are made of water". After scanning, each subject rated the moral content, emotional valence, and judgment difficulty of each sentence on Likert-like scales. To exclude the effect of emotion on the activation results, individual responses were hemodynamically modeled for event-related fMRI analysis. The general linear model was used to evaluate the brain areas activated by moral judgment. RESULTS: Regions activated during moral judgment included the frontopolar cortex (FPC, medial frontal gyrus, right anterior temporal cortex, lenticular nucleus, and cerebellum. Activation of FPC and medial frontal gyrus (BA 10/46 and 9 were largely independent of emotional experience and represented the largest areas of activation. CONCLUSIONS: These results concur with clinical observations assigning a critical role for the frontal poles and right anterior temporal cortex in the mediation of complex judgment processes according to moral constraints. The FPC may work in concert with the orbitofrontal and dorsolateral cortex in the regulation of human social conduct.OBJETIVO: Estudar, com ressonância magnética funcional (RMf, as áreas cerebrais normalmente ativadas por julgamentos morais em tarefa de verificação de sentenças. MÉTODO: Dez adultos normais foram estudados com RMf-BOLD durante a apresentação auditiva de sentenças cujo conteúdo foram instruídos a julgar como "certo" ou "errado". Metade das sentenças possuía um conteúdo moral explícito ("Transgredimos a lei se necess

  17. Moral judgment as information processing: an integrative review.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guglielmo, Steve

    2015-01-01

    How do humans make moral judgments about others' behavior? This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two distinct questions: (1) What input information guides moral judgments? and (2) What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states) that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework and critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds; it then outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and concludes with conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information-processing framework provides a useful theoretical lens through which to organize extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment.

  18. Moral judgment as information processing: an integrative review

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guglielmo, Steve

    2015-01-01

    How do humans make moral judgments about others’ behavior? This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two distinct questions: (1) What input information guides moral judgments? and (2) What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states) that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework and critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds; it then outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and concludes with conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information-processing framework provides a useful theoretical lens through which to organize extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment. PMID:26579022

  19. What Sways People's Judgment of Sleep Quality? A Quantitative Choice-Making Study With Good and Poor Sleepers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ramlee, Fatanah; Sanborn, Adam N; Tang, Nicole K Y

    2017-07-01

    We conceptualized sleep quality judgment as a decision-making process and examined the relative importance of 17 parameters of sleep quality using a choice-based conjoint analysis. One hundred participants (50 good sleepers; 50 poor sleepers) were asked to choose between 2 written scenarios to answer 1 of 2 questions: "Which describes a better (or worse) night of sleep?". Each scenario described a self-reported experience of sleep, stringing together 17 possible determinants of sleep quality that occur at different times of the day (day before, pre-sleep, during sleep, upon waking, day after). Each participant answered 48 questions. Logistic regression models were fit to their choice data. Eleven of the 17 sleep quality parameters had a significant impact on the participants' choices. The top 3 determinants of sleep quality were: Total sleep time, feeling refreshed (upon waking), and mood (day after). Sleep quality judgments were most influenced by factors that occur during sleep, followed by feelings and activities upon waking and the day after. There was a significant interaction between wake after sleep onset and feeling refreshed (upon waking) and between feeling refreshed (upon waking) and question type (better or worse night of sleep). Type of sleeper (good vs poor sleepers) did not significantly influence the judgments. Sleep quality judgments appear to be determined by not only what happened during sleep, but also what happened after the sleep period. Interventions that improve mood and functioning during the day may inadvertently also improve people's self-reported evaluation of sleep quality. © Sleep Research Society 2017. Published by Oxford University Press [on behalf of the Sleep Research Society].

  20. Aspects of application of auditor’s judgments

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    O.L. Sherstiuk

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available Users should receive an adequate level of confidence in the possibility of its use for training, study and implementation of management decisions according to the results of audit of financial information. The source of this confidence is the audit report, based on the auditor's judgment, which is formed as the results of the procedures for obtaining and evaluating of audit evidence. Thus, the judgment of the auditor as a result of his work, has a leading role in forming of results of the audit. 517 The evaluative judgments have the special role among the auditor's judgment, which he creates and justifies in the tasks of the audit. Their content is to determine the set of parameters that determine the nature of the subject of judgment. Auditor’s judgements may be used for the purposes of identification (ID judgment. Identification is the process of definition of information, events, circumstances and other objects. Auditor's procedural judgment has content of the regarding procedures that can be used to obtain information and their volume. The classification makes it possible to identify the application targets of auditor’s professional judgment that in its turn, enables the optimization of measures to meet the tasks of auditing financial information.

  1. Inference of trustworthiness from intuitive moral judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Everett, Jim A C; Pizarro, David A; Crockett, M J

    2016-06-01

    Moral judgments play a critical role in motivating and enforcing human cooperation, and research on the proximate mechanisms of moral judgments highlights the importance of intuitive, automatic processes in forming such judgments. Intuitive moral judgments often share characteristics with deontological theories in normative ethics, which argue that certain acts (such as killing) are absolutely wrong, regardless of their consequences. Why do moral intuitions typically follow deontological prescriptions, as opposed to those of other ethical theories? Here, we test a functional explanation for this phenomenon by investigating whether agents who express deontological moral judgments are more valued as social partners. Across 5 studies, we show that people who make characteristically deontological judgments are preferred as social partners, perceived as more moral and trustworthy, and are trusted more in economic games. These findings provide empirical support for a partner choice account of moral intuitions whereby typically deontological judgments confer an adaptive function by increasing a person's likelihood of being chosen as a cooperation partner. Therefore, deontological moral intuitions may represent an evolutionarily prescribed prior that was selected for through partner choice mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

  2. When psychopathy impairs moral judgments: neural responses during judgments about causing fear.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Marsh, Abigail A; Cardinale, Elise M

    2014-01-01

    Psychopathy is a disorder characterized by reduced empathy, shallow affect and behaviors that cause victims distress, like threats, bullying and violence. Neuroimaging research in both institutionalized and community samples implicates amygdala dysfunction in the etiology of psychopathic traits. Reduced amygdala responsiveness may disrupt processing of fear-relevant stimuli like fearful facial expressions. The present study links amygdala dysfunction in response to fear-relevant stimuli to the willingness of individuals with psychopathic traits to cause fear in other people. Thirty-three healthy adult participants varying in psychopathic traits underwent whole-brain fMRI scanning while they viewed statements that selectively evoke anger, disgust, fear, happiness or sadness. During scanning, participants judged whether it is morally acceptable to make each statement to another person. Psychopathy was associated with reduced activity in right amygdala during judgments of fear-evoking statements and with more lenient moral judgments about causing fear. No group differences in amygdala function or moral judgments emerged for other emotion categories. Psychopathy was also associated with increased activity in middle frontal gyrus (BA 10) during the task. These results implicate amygdala dysfunction in impaired judgments about causing distress in psychopathy and suggest that atypical amygdala responses to fear in psychopathy extend across multiple classes of stimuli.

  3. A Framework of a Computerized Decision Aid to Improve Group Judgments

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Utpal Bose

    2009-09-01

    Full Text Available In organizations, groups of decision makers often meet to make judgments as a group on issues and tasks such as, hiring a person who best fits an open position. In such tasks called cognitive conflict tasks, where there is no conflict of interest, group members attempting to reach a common solution often differ on their perspectives to the problem. Cognitive conflicts have been studied in the context of Social Judgment Theory, which posits that persons or judges make a set of judgments about a set of events based on observation of a set of cues related to the events. Disagreement arises because the judges fail to understand each other’s judgment making policies. In order to reduce disagreement and move the group towards a group judgment policy that has the consensus of the group members and is applied consistently, a computerized decision aid is proposed that can be built around a Group Support System using cognitive mapping as a method of providing cognitive feedback and the Analytic Hierarchy Process to process the conflicting criteria and help an individual formulate a judgment policy, as well as aggregate the individual policies into a group judgment policy. It is argued that such as decision aid by supporting every decision maker in the group to effectively use information about the task so that they have a good understanding of the judgment policy they form, to communicate their evaluation policies accurately to other members, and by providing an iterative mechanism through which members can arrive at a compromise solution to the task, is expected to improve the quality of group judgments.

  4. Acquisition of multiple prior distributions in tactile temporal order judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yasuhito eNagai

    2012-08-01

    Full Text Available The Bayesian estimation theory proposes that the brain acquires the prior distribution of a task and integrates it with sensory signals to minimize the effect of sensory noise. Psychophysical studies have demonstrated that our brain actually implements Bayesian estimation in a variety of sensory-motor tasks. However, these studies only imposed one prior distribution on participants within a task period. In this study, we investigated the conditions that enable the acquisition of multiple prior distributions in temporal order judgment (TOJ of two tactile stimuli across the hands. In Experiment 1, stimulation intervals were randomly selected from one of two prior distributions (biased to right hand earlier and biased to left hand earlier in association with color cues (green and red, respectively. Although the acquisition of the two priors was not enabled by the color cues alone, it was significant when participants shifted their gaze (above or below in response to the color cues. However, the acquisition of multiple priors was not significant when participants moved their mouths (opened or closed. In Experiment 2, the spatial cues (above and below were used to identify which eye position or retinal cue position was crucial for the eye-movement-dependent acquisition of multiple priors in Experiment 1. The acquisition of the two priors was significant when participants moved their gaze to the cues (i.e., the cue positions on the retina were constant across the priors, as well as when participants did not shift their gazes (i.e., the cue positions on the retina changed according to the priors. Thus, both eye and retinal cue positions were effective in acquiring multiple priors. Based on previous neurophysiological reports, we discuss possible neural correlates that contribute to the acquisition of multiple priors.

  5. Human, Nature, Dynamism: The Effects of Content and Movement Perception on Brain Activations during the Aesthetic Judgment of Representational Paintings.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Di Dio, Cinzia; Ardizzi, Martina; Massaro, Davide; Di Cesare, Giuseppe; Gilli, Gabriella; Marchetti, Antonella; Gallese, Vittorio

    2015-01-01

    Movement perception and its role in aesthetic experience have been often studied, within empirical aesthetics, in relation to the human body. No such specificity has been defined in neuroimaging studies with respect to contents lacking a human form. The aim of this work was to explore, through functional magnetic imaging (f MRI), how perceived movement is processed during the aesthetic judgment of paintings using two types of content: human subjects and scenes of nature. Participants, untutored in the arts, were shown the stimuli and asked to make aesthetic judgments. Additionally, they were instructed to observe the paintings and to rate their perceived movement in separate blocks. Observation highlighted spontaneous processes associated with aesthetic experience, whereas movement judgment outlined activations specifically related to movement processing. The ratings recorded during aesthetic judgment revealed that nature scenes received higher scored than human content paintings. The imaging data showed similar activation, relative to baseline, for all stimuli in the three tasks, including activation of occipito-temporal areas, posterior parietal, and premotor cortices. Contrast analyses within aesthetic judgment task showed that human content activated, relative to nature, precuneus, fusiform gyrus, and posterior temporal areas, whose activation was prominent for dynamic human paintings. In contrast, nature scenes activated, relative to human stimuli, occipital and posterior parietal cortex/precuneus, involved in visuospatial exploration and pragmatic coding of movement, as well as central insula. Static nature paintings further activated, relative to dynamic nature stimuli, central and posterior insula. Besides insular activation, which was specific for aesthetic judgment, we found a large overlap in the activation pattern characterizing each stimulus dimension (content and dynamism) across observation, aesthetic judgment, and movement judgment tasks. These

  6. [Clinical judgment is a schema. Conceptual proposals and training perspectives.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nagels, Marc

    2017-06-01

    Clinical judgment is a critical concept for the development of nursing and nursing education. Its theoretical origins are multiple and its definition is not yet consensus. The analysis of the scientific and professional literature shows heterogeneous and dispersed points of views, notably on the role of intuition, on its cognitive and metacognitive dimensions, and on its proximity to other concepts. Between professional stakes and epistemological constructions, clinical judgment is still an emerging concept.To overcome the obstacle and contribute to the theoretical effort, we will argue that clinical judgment must be analyzed as a schema. It presents all the characteristics : diagnosis and information necessary for reasoning, rational decision-making process, metacognitive control and evaluation of decision-making. Perspectives then open to better understand the nursing activity.In conclusion, recommendations for developing clinical judgment in training will be presented.

  7. Latent Fairness in Adults' Relationship-Based Moral Judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hao, Jian; Liu, Yanchun; Li, Jiafeng

    2015-01-01

    Can adults make fair moral judgments when individuals with whom they have different relationships are involved? The present study explored the fairness of adults' relationship-based moral judgments in two respects by performing three experiments involving 999 participants. In Experiment 1, 65 adults were asked to decide whether to harm a specific person to save five strangers in the footbridge and trolley dilemmas in a within-subject design. The lone potential victim was a relative, a best friend, a person they disliked, a criminal or a stranger. Adults' genetic relatedness to, familiarity with and affective relatedness to the lone potential victims varied. The results indicated that adults made different moral judgments involving the lone potential victims with whom they had different relationships. In Experiment 2, 306 adults responded to the footbridge and trolley dilemmas involving five types of lone potential victims in a within-subject design, and the extent to which they were familiar with and affectively related to the lone potential victim was measured. The results generally replicated those of Experiment 1. In addition, for close individuals, adults' moral judgments were less deontological relative to their familiarity with or positive affect toward these individuals. For individuals they were not close to, adults made deontological choices to a larger extent relative to their unfamiliarity with or negative affect toward these individuals. Moreover, for familiar individuals, the extent to which adults made deontological moral judgments more closely approximated the extent to which they were familiar with the individual. The adults' deontological moral judgments involving unfamiliar individuals more closely approximated their affective relatedness to the individuals. In Experiment 3, 628 adults were asked to make moral judgments with the type of lone potential victim as the between-subject variable. The results generally replicated those of the previous

  8. Latent Fairness in Adults’ Relationship-Based Moral Judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hao, Jian; Liu, Yanchun; Li, Jiafeng

    2015-01-01

    Can adults make fair moral judgments when individuals with whom they have different relationships are involved? The present study explored the fairness of adults’ relationship-based moral judgments in two respects by performing three experiments involving 999 participants. In Experiment 1, 65 adults were asked to decide whether to harm a specific person to save five strangers in the footbridge and trolley dilemmas in a within-subject design. The lone potential victim was a relative, a best friend, a person they disliked, a criminal or a stranger. Adults’ genetic relatedness to, familiarity with and affective relatedness to the lone potential victims varied. The results indicated that adults made different moral judgments involving the lone potential victims with whom they had different relationships. In Experiment 2, 306 adults responded to the footbridge and trolley dilemmas involving five types of lone potential victims in a within-subject design, and the extent to which they were familiar with and affectively related to the lone potential victim was measured. The results generally replicated those of Experiment 1. In addition, for close individuals, adults’ moral judgments were less deontological relative to their familiarity with or positive affect toward these individuals. For individuals they were not close to, adults made deontological choices to a larger extent relative to their unfamiliarity with or negative affect toward these individuals. Moreover, for familiar individuals, the extent to which adults made deontological moral judgments more closely approximated the extent to which they were familiar with the individual. The adults’ deontological moral judgments involving unfamiliar individuals more closely approximated their affective relatedness to the individuals. In Experiment 3, 628 adults were asked to make moral judgments with the type of lone potential victim as the between-subject variable. The results generally replicated those of the

  9. Sound improves diminished visual temporal sensitivity in schizophrenia

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    de Boer-Schellekens, L.; Stekelenburg, J.J.; Maes, J.P.; van Gool, A.R.; Vroomen, J.

    2014-01-01

    Visual temporal processing and multisensory integration (MSI) of sound and vision were examined in individuals with schizophrenia using a visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. Compared to a non-psychiatric control group, persons with schizophrenia were less sensitive judging the temporal order

  10. Neural development of mentalizing in moral judgment from adolescence to adulthood.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harenski, Carla L; Harenski, Keith A; Shane, Matthew S; Kiehl, Kent A

    2012-01-01

    The neural mechanisms underlying moral judgment have been extensively studied in healthy adults. How these mechanisms evolve from adolescence to adulthood has received less attention. Brain regions that have been consistently implicated in moral judgment in adults, including the superior temporal cortex and prefrontal cortex, undergo extensive developmental changes from adolescence to adulthood. Thus, their role in moral judgment may also change over time. In the present study, 51 healthy male participants age 13–53 were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed pictures that did or did not depict situations considered by most individuals to represent moral violations, and rated their degree of moral violation severity. Consistent with predictions, a regression analysis revealed a positive correlation between age and hemodynamic activity in the temporo-parietal junction when participants made decisions regarding moral severity.This region is known to contribute to mentalizing processes during moral judgment in adults and suggests that adolescents use these types of inferences less during moral judgment than do adults. A positive correlation with age was also present in the posterior cingulate. Overall, the results suggest that the brain regions utilized in moral judgment change over development.

  11. Making Decisions under Ambiguity: Judgment Bias Tasks for Assessing Emotional State in Animals

    Science.gov (United States)

    Roelofs, Sanne; Boleij, Hetty; Nordquist, Rebecca E.; van der Staay, Franz Josef

    2016-01-01

    Judgment bias tasks (JBTs) are considered as a family of promising tools in the assessment of emotional states of animals. JBTs provide a cognitive measure of optimism and/or pessimism by recording behavioral responses to ambiguous stimuli. For instance, a negative emotional state is expected to produce a negative or pessimistic judgment of an ambiguous stimulus, whereas a positive emotional state produces a positive or optimistic judgment of the same ambiguous stimulus. Measuring an animal’s emotional state or mood is relevant in both animal welfare research and biomedical research. This is reflected in the increasing use of JBTs in both research areas. We discuss the different implementations of JBTs with animals, with a focus on their potential as an accurate measure of emotional state. JBTs have been successfully applied to a very broad range of species, using many different types of testing equipment and experimental protocols. However, further validation of this test is deemed necessary. For example, the often extensive training period required for successful judgment bias testing remains a possible factor confounding results. Also, the issue of ambiguous stimuli losing their ambiguity with repeated testing requires additional attention. Possible improvements are suggested to further develop the JBTs in both animal welfare and biomedical research. PMID:27375454

  12. The neural basis of intuitive and counterintuitive moral judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wiech, Katja; Shackel, Nicholas; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian; Tracey, Irene

    2012-01-01

    Neuroimaging studies on moral decision-making have thus far largely focused on differences between moral judgments with opposing utilitarian (well-being maximizing) and deontological (duty-based) content. However, these studies have investigated moral dilemmas involving extreme situations, and did not control for two distinct dimensions of moral judgment: whether or not it is intuitive (immediately compelling to most people) and whether it is utilitarian or deontological in content. By contrasting dilemmas where utilitarian judgments are counterintuitive with dilemmas in which they are intuitive, we were able to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of intuitive and counterintuitive judgments across a range of moral situations. Irrespective of content (utilitarian/deontological), counterintuitive moral judgments were associated with greater difficulty and with activation in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that such judgments may involve emotional conflict; intuitive judgments were linked to activation in the visual and premotor cortex. In addition, we obtained evidence that neural differences in moral judgment in such dilemmas are largely due to whether they are intuitive and not, as previously assumed, to differences between utilitarian and deontological judgments. Our findings therefore do not support theories that have generally associated utilitarian and deontological judgments with distinct neural systems. PMID:21421730

  13. From moral to legal judgment: the influence of normative context in lawyers and other academics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schleim, Stephan; Spranger, Tade M; Erk, Susanne; Walter, Henrik

    2011-01-01

    Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral and legal decision-making. While we found activation of brain areas comprising the so-called 'moral brain' in both conditions, there was stronger activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus particularly when subjects made legal decisions, suggesting that these were made in respect to more explicit rules and demanded more complex semantic processing. Comparing both groups, our data show that behaviorally lawyers conceived themselves as emotionally less involved during normative decision-making in general. A group × condition interaction in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex suggests a modulation of normative decision-making by attention based on subjects' normative expertise.

  14. Dysarthria of Motor Neuron Disease: Clinician Judgments of Severity.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Seikel, J. Anthony; And Others

    1990-01-01

    This study investigated the relationship between the temporal-acoustic parameters of the speech of 15 adults with motor neuron disease. Differences in predictions of the progression of the disease and clinician judgments of dysarthria severity were found to relate to the linguistic systems of both speaker and judge. (Author/JDD)

  15. Automatic and controlled components of judgment and decision making

    OpenAIRE

    Ferreira, MB; Garcia-Marques, L; Sherman, SJ; Sherman, JW

    2006-01-01

    The categorization of inductive reasoning into largely automatic processes (heuristic reasoning) and controlled analytical processes (rule-based reasoning) put forward by dual-process approaches of judgment under uncertainty (e.g., K. E. Stanovich & R. F. West, 2000) has been primarily a matter of assumption with a scarcity of direct empirical findings supporting it. The present authors use the process dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) to provide convergent evidence validating a d...

  16. 40 CFR 94.221 - Application of good engineering judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... judgment in making all decisions called for under this part, including but not limited to selections... was not made in good faith, or that the decision was not made with a rational basis, the Administrator... Administrator may reject any such decision by a manufacturer if it is not based on good engineering judgment or...

  17. THE MEMORY OF JUDGMENT:

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    eliasn

    Lawrence Douglas' book1, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History ... film that is not amenable to cross-examination— in a manner that advances his ... willed by more, and tolerated by all”.7 Although the height of the war .... forum that assists in the assessment of the question of guilt or innocence in an.

  18. The Effect of Sad Facial Expressions on Weight Judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Trent D Weston

    2015-04-01

    Full Text Available Although the body weight evaluation (e.g., normal or overweight of others relies on perceptual impressions, it also can be influenced by other psychosocial factors. In this study, we explored the effect of task-irrelevant emotional facial expressions on judgments of body weight and the relationship between emotion-induced weight judgment bias and other psychosocial variables including attitudes towards obese person. Forty-four participants were asked to quickly make binary body weight decisions for 960 randomized sad and neutral faces of varying weight levels presented on a computer screen. The results showed that sad facial expressions systematically decreased the decision threshold of overweight judgments for male faces. This perceptual decision bias by emotional expressions was positively correlated with the belief that being overweight is not under the control of obese persons. Our results provide experimental evidence that task-irrelevant emotional expressions can systematically change the decision threshold for weight judgments, demonstrating that sad expressions can make faces appear more overweight than they would otherwise be judged.

  19. The Influence of Self-Ratings versus Peer Ratings on Supervisors' Performance Judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Makiney; Levy

    1998-06-01

    This study investigated the extent to which supervisors use feedback from outside sources in making performance judgments. A simulation was conducted in which participants with organizational supervisory experience made an initial performance judgment about a profiled employee. Participants then received additional information that was discrepant from their initial judgment (positive or negative) from one of two sources (the profiled employee himself or one of his peers). The direction of the discrepant information and its source interacted in determining final ratings, such that, participants were more likely to use discrepant information to alter their performance judgments in a consistent direction when the source was a peer than when the source was the employee himself. Furthermore, participants' opinions about the usefulness of peer information for performance judgments moderated this interaction. Specifically, participants who believed that information from an employee's peers was useful, were more likely to use discrepant information provided by a peer when making final performance judgments than were participants who did not believe that information from an employee's peers was useful. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

  20. Contrasting cue-density effects in causal and prediction judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vadillo, Miguel A; Musca, Serban C; Blanco, Fernando; Matute, Helena

    2011-02-01

    Many theories of contingency learning assume (either explicitly or implicitly) that predicting whether an outcome will occur should be easier than making a causal judgment. Previous research suggests that outcome predictions would depart from normative standards less often than causal judgments, which is consistent with the idea that the latter are based on more numerous and complex processes. However, only indirect evidence exists for this view. The experiment presented here specifically addresses this issue by allowing for a fair comparison of causal judgments and outcome predictions, both collected at the same stage with identical rating scales. Cue density, a parameter known to affect judgments, is manipulated in a contingency learning paradigm. The results show that, if anything, the cue-density bias is stronger in outcome predictions than in causal judgments. These results contradict key assumptions of many influential theories of contingency learning.

  1. The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bass, Ellen J.; Baumgart, Leigh A.; Shepley, Kathryn Klein

    2014-01-01

    Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noisy sensor data are used by both the human and the information analysis automation to make judgments. In a simplified air traffic conflict prediction experiment, 32 participants made probability of horizontal conflict judgments under different display content conditions. After being exposed to the information analysis automation, judgment achievement significantly improved for all participants as compared to judgments without any of the automation's information. Participants provided with additional display content pertaining to cue variability in the task environment had significantly higher aided judgment achievement compared to those provided with only the automation's judgment of a probability of conflict. When designing information analysis automation for environments where the automation's judgment achievement is impacted by noisy environmental data, it may be beneficial to show additional task environment information to the human judge in order to improve judgment performance. PMID:24847184

  2. The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bass, Ellen J; Baumgart, Leigh A; Shepley, Kathryn Klein

    2013-03-01

    Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noisy sensor data are used by both the human and the information analysis automation to make judgments. In a simplified air traffic conflict prediction experiment, 32 participants made probability of horizontal conflict judgments under different display content conditions. After being exposed to the information analysis automation, judgment achievement significantly improved for all participants as compared to judgments without any of the automation's information. Participants provided with additional display content pertaining to cue variability in the task environment had significantly higher aided judgment achievement compared to those provided with only the automation's judgment of a probability of conflict. When designing information analysis automation for environments where the automation's judgment achievement is impacted by noisy environmental data, it may be beneficial to show additional task environment information to the human judge in order to improve judgment performance.

  3. The Empirical content of theories in judgment and decision making: Shortcomings and remedies

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Andreas Glockner

    2011-12-01

    Full Text Available According to Karl Popper, we can tell good theories from poor ones by assessing their empirical content (empirischer Gehalt, which basically reflects how much information they convey concerning the world. ``The empirical content of a statement increases with its degree of falsifiability: the more a statement forbids, the more it says about the world of experience.'' Two criteria to evaluate the empirical content of a theory are their level of universality (Allgemeinheit and their degree of precision (Bestimmtheit. The former specifies how many situations it can be applied to. The latter refers to the specificity in prediction, that is, how many subclasses of realizations it allows. We conduct an analysis of the empirical content of theories in Judgment and Decision Making (JDM and identify the challenges in theory formulation for different classes of models. Elaborating on classic Popperian ideas, we suggest some guidelines for publication of theoretical work.

  4. Making judgments about ability: the role of implicit theories of ability in moderating inferences from temporal and social comparison information.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Butler, R

    2000-05-01

    Two studies examined the novel proposal that implicit theories of intelligence (C. S. Dweck & E. L. Leggett, 1988) moderate both the effects of performance trends on ability inferences and the perceived diagnosticity of temporal versus normative feedback. Results from 613 adolescents and 42 teachers confirmed that entity theorists perceived initial outcome as more diagnostic and inferred higher ability in another (Study 1) and in the self (Study 2) in a declining outcome condition; incremental theorists perceived last outcome as more diagnostic and inferred higher ability in an ascending condition. Experimental induction of beliefs about ability had similar effects. As predicted, self-appraisal was affected more by temporal feedback among incremental theorists and by normative feedback among entity theorists. Results help resolve prior mixed findings regarding order effects and responses to temporal and normative evaluation.

  5. Are normative probabilty judgments a "system two"-operation?

    OpenAIRE

    Carlberg, Joakim

    2017-01-01

    Previous research on human judgment and decision making has demonstrated systematic and predictable biases of judgment in experimental settings. One example of this is the tendency to intuitively violate the conjunction rule - a simple rule of probability. This was well illustrated in the famous Linda-problem. (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). According to the dual-process theory of reasoning, (Kahneman, 2011) reasoning fallacies such as the conjunction fallacy occurs when people fail to use an...

  6. How clinicians make (or avoid) moral judgments of patients: implications of the evidence for relationships and research

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    Physicians, nurses, and other clinicians readily acknowledge being troubled by encounters with patients who trigger moral judgments. For decades social scientists have noted that moral judgment of patients is pervasive, occurring not only in egregious and criminal cases but also in everyday situations in which appraisals of patients' social worth and culpability are routine. There is scant literature, however, on the actual prevalence and dynamics of moral judgment in healthcare. The indirect evidence available suggests that moral appraisals function via a complex calculus that reflects variation in patient characteristics, clinician characteristics, task, and organizational factors. The full impact of moral judgment on healthcare relationships, patient outcomes, and clinicians' own well-being is yet unknown. The paucity of attention to moral judgment, despite its significance for patient-centered care, communication, empathy, professionalism, healthcare education, stereotyping, and outcome disparities, represents a blind spot that merits explanation and repair. New methodologies in social psychology and neuroscience have yielded models for how moral judgment operates in healthcare and how research in this area should proceed. Clinicians, educators, and researchers would do well to recognize both the legitimate and illegitimate moral appraisals that are apt to occur in healthcare settings. PMID:20618947

  7. Assessment of Group Preferences and Group Uncertainty for Decision Making

    Science.gov (United States)

    1976-06-01

    the individ- uals. decision making , group judgments should be preferred to individual judgments if obtaining group judgments costs more. -26- -YI IV... decision making group . IV. A. 3. Aggregation using conjugate distribution. Arvther procedure for combining indivi(jai probability judgments into a group...statisticized group group decision making group judgment subjective probability Delphi method expected utility nominal group 20. ABSTRACT (Continue on

  8. The role of emotions for moral judgments depends on the type of emotion and moral scenario.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ugazio, Giuseppe; Lamm, Claus; Singer, Tania

    2012-06-01

    Emotions seem to play a critical role in moral judgment. However, the way in which emotions exert their influence on moral judgments is still poorly understood. This study proposes a novel theoretical approach suggesting that emotions influence moral judgments based on their motivational dimension. We tested the effects of two types of induced emotions with equal valence but with different motivational implications (anger and disgust), and four types of moral scenarios (disgust-related, impersonal, personal, and beliefs) on moral judgments. We hypothesized and found that approach motivation associated with anger would make moral judgments more permissible, while disgust, associated with withdrawal motivation, would make them less permissible. Moreover, these effects varied as a function of the type of scenario: the induced emotions only affected moral judgments concerning impersonal and personal scenarios, while we observed no effects for the other scenarios. These findings suggest that emotions can play an important role in moral judgment, but that their specific effects depend upon the type of emotion induced. Furthermore, induced emotion effects were more prevalent for moral decisions in personal and impersonal scenarios, possibly because these require the performance of an action rather than making an abstract judgment. We conclude that the effects of induced emotions on moral judgments can be predicted by taking their motivational dimension into account. This finding has important implications for moral psychology, as it points toward a previously overlooked mechanism linking emotions to moral judgments.

  9. Discrepancies between judgment and choice of action in moral dilemmas

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sébastien eTassy

    2013-05-01

    Full Text Available Everyone has experienced the potential discrepancy between what one judges as morally acceptable and what one actually does when a choice between alternative behaviors is to be made. The present study explores empirically whether judgment and choice of action differ when people make decisions on dilemmas involving moral issues. 240 participants evaluated 24 moral and non-moral dilemmas either by judging (Is it acceptable to… or reporting the choice of action they would make (Would you do…. We also investigated the influence of varying the number of people benefiting from the decision and the closeness of relationship of the decision maker with the potential victim on these two types of decision. Variations in the number of beneficiaries from the decision did not influence judgment nor choice of action. By contrast, closeness of relationship with the victim had a greater influence on the choice of action than on judgment. This differentiation between evaluative judgments and choices of action argues in favor of each of them being supported by (at least partially different psychological processes.

  10. Temporal dynamics of disgust and morality: an event-related potential study.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Qun Yang

    Full Text Available Disgust is argued to be an emotion that motivates the avoidance of disease-causing entities in the physical domain and unacceptable behaviors in the social-moral domain. Empirical work from behavioral, physiological and brain imaging studies suggests moral judgments are strongly modulated by disgust feelings. Yet, it remains unclear how they are related in the time course of neural processing. Examining the temporal order of disgust emotion and morality could help to clarify the role of disgust in moral judgments. In the present research, a Go/No-Go paradigm was employed to evoke lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs to investigate the temporal order of physical disgust and moral information processing. Participants were asked to give a "yes" or "no" response regarding the physical disgust and moral wrongness of a social act. The results showed that the evaluation of moral information was processed prior to that of physical disgust information. This suggests that moral information is available earlier than physical disgust, and provides more data on the biological heterogeneity between disgust and morality in terms of the time course of neural activity. The findings implicate that physical disgust emotion may not be necessary for people to make moral judgments. They also suggest that some of our moral experience may be more fundamental (than physical disgust experience to our survival and development, as humans spend a considerable amount of time engaging in social interaction.

  11. Does ADHD in Adults Affect the Relative Accuracy of Metamemory Judgments?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Knouse, Laura E.; Paradise, Matthew J.; Dunlosky, John

    2006-01-01

    Objective: Prior research suggests that individuals with ADHD overestimate their performance across domains despite performing more poorly in these domains. The authors introduce measures of accuracy from the larger realm of judgment and decision making--namely, relative accuracy and calibration--to the study of self-evaluative judgment accuracy…

  12. Experiential Social Justice Judgment Processes

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Maas, M.

    2008-01-01

    Social justice can be thought of as an idea that exists within the minds of individuals and that concerns issues like what is right and wrong, what ought to be or not to be, and what is fair or unfair. This subjective quality of the justice judgment process makes it rather unpredictable how people

  13. The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments

    OpenAIRE

    Bass, Ellen J.; Baumgart, Leigh A.; Shepley, Kathryn Klein

    2012-01-01

    Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noi...

  14. Factors involved in making post-performance judgments in mathematics problem-solving.

    Science.gov (United States)

    García Fernández, Trinidad; Kroesbergen, Evelyn; Rodríguez Pérez, Celestino; González-Castro, Paloma; González-Pienda, Julio A

    2015-01-01

    This study examines the impact of executive functions, affective-motivational variables related to mathematics, mathematics achievement and task characteristics on fifth and sixth graders’ calibration accuracy after completing two mathematical problems. A sample of 188 students took part in the study. They were divided into two groups as function of their judgment accuracy after completing the two tasks (accurate= 79, inaccurate= 109). Differences between these groups were examined. The discriminative value of these variables to predict group membership was analyzed, as well as the effect of age, gender, and grade level. The results indicated that accurate students showed better levels of executive functioning, and more positive feelings, beliefs, and motivation related to mathematics. They also spent more time on the tasks. Mathematics achievement, perceived usefulness of mathematics, and time spent on Task 1 significantly predicted group membership, classifying 71.3% of the sample correctly. These results support the relationship between academic achievement and calibration accuracy, suggesting the need to consider a wide range of factors when explaining performance judgments.

  15. Strategic environmental assessment quality assurance: evaluating and improving the consistency of judgments in assessment panels

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Noble, Bram F.

    2004-01-01

    Assessment panels and expert judgment are playing increasing roles in the practice of strategic environmental assessment (SEA). Thus, the quality of an SEA decision rests considerably on the quality of the judgments of the assessment panel. However, there exists very little guidance in the SEA literature for practitioners concerning the treatment and integration of expert judgment into SEA decision-making processes. Subsequently, the performance of SEAs based on expert judgment is often less than satisfactory, and quality improvements are required in the SEA process. Based on the lessons learned from strategic- and project-level impact assessment practices, this paper outlines a number of principles concerning the use of assessment panels in SEA decision-making, and attempts to provide some guidance for SEA practitioners in this regard. Particular attention is given to the notion and value of consistency in assessment panel judgments

  16. Relationship between ethical ideology and moral judgment: Academic nurse educators' perception.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Abou Hashish, Ebtsam Aly; Ali Awad, Nadia Hassan

    2017-01-01

    Ascertaining the relationship between ethical ideology, moral judgment, and ethical decision among academic nurse educators at work appears to be a challenge particularly in situations when they are faced with a need to solve an ethical problem and make a moral decision. This study aims to investigate the relationship between ethical ideology, moral judgment, and ethical decision as perceived by academic nurse educators. A descriptive correlational research design was conducted at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. All academic nurse educators were included in the study (N = 220). Ethical Position Questionnaire and Questionnaire of Moral Judgment and Ethical Decisions were proved reliable to measure study variables. Ethical considerations: Approval was obtained from Ethics Committee at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. Privacy and confidentiality of data were maintained and assured by obtaining subjects' informed consent. This study reveals a significant positive moderate correlation between idealism construct of ethical ideology and moral judgment in terms of recognition of the behavior as an ethical issue and the magnitude of emotional consequences of the ethical situation (p relativism construct of ethical ideology and overall moral judgment (p = 0.010). Approximately 3.5% of the explained variance of overall moral judgment is predicted by idealism together with relativism. The findings suggest that variations in ethical position and ideology are associated with moral judgment and ethical decision. Organizations of academic nursing education should provide a supportive work environment to help their academic staff to develop their self-awareness and knowledge of their ethical position and promoting their ethical ideologies and, in turn, enhance their moral judgment as well as develop ethical reasoning and decision-making capability of nursing students. More emphasis in nursing curricula is needed on ethical concepts for developing nursing

  17. First- and Second-Order Metacognitive Judgments of Semantic Memory Reports: The Influence of Personality Traits and Cognitive Styles

    Science.gov (United States)

    Buratti, Sandra; Allwood, Carl Martin; Kleitman, Sabina

    2013-01-01

    In learning contexts, people need to make realistic confidence judgments about their memory performance. The present study investigated whether second-order judgments of first-order confidence judgments could help people improve their confidence judgments of semantic memory information. Furthermore, we assessed whether different personality and…

  18. The effect of analytic and experiential modes of thought on moral judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kvaran, Trevor; Nichols, Shaun; Sanfey, Alan

    2013-01-01

    According to dual-process theories, moral judgments are the result of two competing processes: a fast, automatic, affect-driven process and a slow, deliberative, reason-based process. Accordingly, these models make clear and testable predictions about the influence of each system. Although a small number of studies have attempted to examine each process independently in the context of moral judgment, no study has yet tried to experimentally manipulate both processes within a single study. In this chapter, a well-established "mode-of-thought" priming technique was used to place participants in either an experiential/emotional or analytic mode while completing a task in which participants provide judgments about a series of moral dilemmas. We predicted that individuals primed analytically would make more utilitarian responses than control participants, while emotional priming would lead to less utilitarian responses. Support was found for both of these predictions. Implications of these findings for dual-process theories of moral judgment will be discussed. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  19. What Makes Children Defy Majorities? The Role of Dissenters in Chinese and Spanish Preschoolers' Social Judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Enesco, Ileana; Sebastián-Enesco, Carla; Guerrero, Silvia; Quan, Siyu; Garijo, Sonia

    2016-01-01

    When many people say the same thing, the individual is more likely to endorse this information than when just a single person says the same. Yet, the influence of consensus information may be modulated by many personal, contextual and cultural variables. Here, we study the sensitivity of Chinese ( N = 68) and Spanish ( N = 82) preschoolers to consensus in social decision making contexts. Children faced two different types of peer-interaction events, which involved (1) uncertain or ambiguous scenarios open to interpretation (social interpretation context), and (2) explicit scenarios depicting the exclusion of a peer (moral judgment context). Children first observed a video in which a group of teachers offered their opinion about the events, and then they were asked to evaluate the information provided. Participants were assigned to two conditions that differed in the type of consensus: Unanimous majority ( non-dissenter condition) and non-unanimous majority ( dissenter condition). In the dissenter condition, we presented the conflicting opinions of three teachers vs. one teacher. In the non-dissenter condition, we presented the unanimous opinion of three teachers. The general results indicated that children's sensitivity to consensus varies depending both on the degree of ambiguity of the social events and the presence or not of a dissenter: (1) Children were much more likely to endorse the majority view when they were uncertain (social interpretation context), than when they already had a clear interpretation of the situation (moral judgment context); (2) The presence of a dissenter resulted in a significant decrease in children's confidence in majority. Interestingly, in the moral judgment context, Chinese and Spanish children differed in their willingness to defy a majority whose opinion run against their own. While Spanish children maintained their own criteria regardless of the type of condition, Chinese children did so when an "allied" dissenter was present

  20. What makes children defy majorities? The role of dissenters in Chinese and Spanish preschoolers’ social judgments.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ileana Enesco

    2016-10-01

    Full Text Available When many people say the same thing, the individual is more likely to endorse this information than when just a single person says the same. Yet, the influence of consensus information may be modulated by many personal, contextual and cultural variables. Here, we study the sensitivity of Chinese (N = 68 and Spanish (N = 82 preschoolers to consensus in social decision making contexts. Children faced two different types of peer-interaction events, which involved (1 uncertain or ambiguous scenarios open to interpretation (social interpretation context, and (2 explicit scenarios depicting the exclusion of a peer (moral judgment context. Children first observed a video in which a group of teachers offered their opinion about the events, and then they were asked to evaluate the information provided. Participants were assigned to two conditions that differed in the type of consensus: Unanimous majority (non-dissenter condition and non-unanimous majority (dissenter condition. In the dissenter condition, we presented the conflicting opinions of three teachers vs. one teacher. In the non-dissenter condition, we presented the unanimous opinion of three teachers. The general results indicated that children’s sensitivity to consensus varies depending both on the degree of ambiguity of the social events and the presence or not of a dissenter: 1 Children were much more likely to endorse the majority view when they were uncertain (social interpretation context, than when they already had a clear interpretation of the situation (moral judgment context; 2 The presence of a dissenter resulted in a significant decrease in children’s confidence in majority. Interestingly, in the moral judgment context, Chinese and Spanish children differed in their willingness to defy a majority whose opinion run against their own. While Spanish children maintained their own criteria regardless of the type of condition, Chinese children did so when an allied dissenter was

  1. Human object-similarity judgments reflect and transcend the primate-IT object representation

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Marieke eMur

    2013-03-01

    Full Text Available Primate inferior temporal (IT cortex is thought to contain a high-level representation of objects at the interface between vision and semantics. This suggests that the perceived similarity of real-world objects might be predicted from the IT representation. Here we show that objects that elicit similar activity patterns in human IT tend to be judged as similar by humans. The IT representation explained the human judgments better than early visual cortex, other ventral stream regions, and a range of computational models. Human similarity judgments exhibited category clusters that reflected several categorical divisions that are prevalent in the IT representation of both human and monkey, including the animate/inanimate and the face/body division. Human judgments also reflected the within-category representation of IT. However, the judgments transcended the IT representation in that they introduced additional categorical divisions. In particular, human judgments emphasized human-related additional divisions between human and nonhuman animals and between man-made and natural objects. Human IT was more similar to monkey IT than to human judgments. One interpretation is that IT has evolved visual feature detectors that distinguish between animates and inanimates and between faces and bodies because these divisions are fundamental to survival and reproduction for all primate species, and that other brain systems serve to more flexibly introduce species-dependent and evolutionarily more recent divisions.

  2. A person-centered approach to moral judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Uhlmann, Eric Luis; Pizarro, David A; Diermeier, Daniel

    2015-01-01

    Both normative theories of ethics in philosophy and contemporary models of moral judgment in psychology have focused almost exclusively on the permissibility of acts, in particular whether acts should be judged on the basis of their material outcomes (consequentialist ethics) or on the basis of rules, duties, and obligations (deontological ethics). However, a longstanding third perspective on morality, virtue ethics, may offer a richer descriptive account of a wide range of lay moral judgments. Building on this ethical tradition, we offer a person-centered account of moral judgment, which focuses on individuals as the unit of analysis for moral evaluations rather than on acts. Because social perceivers are fundamentally motivated to acquire information about the moral character of others, features of an act that seem most informative of character often hold more weight than either the consequences of the act or whether a moral rule has been broken. This approach, we argue, can account for numerous empirical findings that are either not predicted by current theories of moral psychology or are simply categorized as biases or irrational quirks in the way individuals make moral judgments. © The Author(s) 2014.

  3. Temporal order processing of syllables in the left parietal lobe.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Moser, Dana; Baker, Julie M; Sanchez, Carmen E; Rorden, Chris; Fridriksson, Julius

    2009-10-07

    Speech processing requires the temporal parsing of syllable order. Individuals suffering from posterior left hemisphere brain injury often exhibit temporal processing deficits as well as language deficits. Although the right posterior inferior parietal lobe has been implicated in temporal order judgments (TOJs) of visual information, there is limited evidence to support the role of the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL) in processing syllable order. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the left inferior parietal lobe is recruited during temporal order judgments of speech stimuli. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected on 14 normal participants while they completed the following forced-choice tasks: (1) syllable order of multisyllabic pseudowords, (2) syllable identification of single syllables, and (3) gender identification of both multisyllabic and monosyllabic speech stimuli. Results revealed increased neural recruitment in the left inferior parietal lobe when participants made judgments about syllable order compared with both syllable identification and gender identification. These findings suggest that the left inferior parietal lobe plays an important role in processing syllable order and support the hypothesized role of this region as an interface between auditory speech and the articulatory code. Furthermore, a breakdown in this interface may explain some components of the speech deficits observed after posterior damage to the left hemisphere.

  4. The contribution of local features to familiarity judgments in music.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bigand, Emmanuel; Gérard, Yannick; Molin, Paul

    2009-07-01

    The contributions of local and global features to object identification depend upon the context. For example, while local features play an essential role in identification of words and objects, the global features are more influential in face recognition. In order to evaluate the respective strengths of local and global features for face recognition, researchers usually ask participants to recognize human faces (famous or learned) in normal and scrambled pictures. In this paper, we address a similar issue in music. We present the results of an experiment in which musically untrained participants were asked to differentiate famous from unknown musical excerpts that were presented in normal or scrambled ways. Manipulating the size of the temporal window on which the scrambling procedure was applied allowed us to evaluate the minimal length of time necessary for participants to make a familiarity judgment. Quite surprisingly, the minimum duration for differentiation of famous from unknown pieces is extremely short. This finding highlights the contribution of very local features to music memory.

  5. Disgust sensitivity is primarily associated with purity-based moral judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wagemans, Fieke M A; Brandt, Mark J; Zeelenberg, Marcel

    2018-03-01

    Individual differences in disgust sensitivity are associated with a range of judgments and attitudes related to the moral domain. Some perspectives suggest that the association between disgust sensitivity and moral judgments will be equally strong across all moral domains (i.e., purity, authority, loyalty, care, fairness, and liberty). Other perspectives predict that disgust sensitivity is primarily associated with judgments of specific moral domains (e.g., primarily purity). However, no study has systematically tested if disgust sensitivity is associated with moral judgments of the purity domain specifically, more generally to moral judgments of the binding moral domains, or to moral judgments of all of the moral domains equally. Across 5 studies (total N = 1,104), we find consistent evidence for the notion that disgust sensitivity relates more strongly to moral condemnation of purity-based transgressions (meta-analytic r = .40) than to moral condemnation of transgressions of any of the other domains (range meta-analytic rs: .07-.27). Our findings are in line with predictions from Moral Foundations Theory, which predicts that personality characteristics like disgust sensitivity make people more sensitive to a certain set of moral issues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

  6. Are happier people less judgmental of other people's selfish behaviors? Experimental survey evidence from trust and gift exchange games.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Drouvelis, Michalis; Powdthavee, Nattavudh

    2015-10-01

    What determines people's moral judgments of selfish behaviors? Here we study whether people's normative views in trust and gift exchange games, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance, are themselves functions of positive emotions. We use experimental survey methods to investigate the moral judgments of impartial observers empirically, and explore whether we could influence subsequent judgments by deliberately making some individuals happier. We find that moral judgments of selfish behaviors in the economic context depend strongly on the behavior of the interaction partner of the judged person, but their relationships are significantly moderated by an increase in happiness for the person making the judgment.

  7. Clinical versus actuarial judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dawes, R M; Faust, D; Meehl, P E

    1989-03-31

    Professionals are frequently consulted to diagnose and predict human behavior; optimal treatment and planning often hinge on the consultant's judgmental accuracy. The consultant may rely on one of two contrasting approaches to decision-making--the clinical and actuarial methods. Research comparing these two approaches shows the actuarial method to be superior. Factors underlying the greater accuracy of actuarial methods, sources of resistance to the scientific findings, and the benefits of increased reliance on actuarial approaches are discussed.

  8. Temporal Dissociation of Neocortical and Hippocampal Contributions to Mental Time Travel Using Intracranial Recordings in Humans.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schurr, Roey; Nitzan, Mor; Eliahou, Ruth; Spinelli, Laurent; Seeck, Margitta; Blanke, Olaf; Arzy, Shahar

    2018-01-01

    In mental time travel (MTT) one is "traveling" back-and-forth in time, remembering, and imagining events. Despite intensive research regarding memory processes in the hippocampus, it was only recently shown that the hippocampus plays an essential role in encoding the temporal order of events remembered, and therefore plays an important role in MTT. Does it also encode the temporal relations of these events to the remembering self? We asked patients undergoing pre-surgical evaluation with depth electrodes penetrating the temporal lobes bilaterally toward the hippocampus to project themselves in time to a past, future, or present time-point, and then make judgments regarding various events. Classification analysis of intracranial evoked potentials revealed clear temporal dissociation in the left hemisphere between lateral-temporal electrodes, activated at ~100-300 ms, and hippocampal electrodes, activated at ~400-600 ms. This dissociation may suggest a division of labor in the temporal lobe during self-projection in time, hinting toward the different roles of the lateral-temporal cortex and the hippocampus in MTT and the temporal organization of the related events with respect to the experiencing self.

  9. Empathy as a neuropsychological heuristic in social decision-making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ramsøy, Thomas Zoëga; Skov, Martin; Macoveanu, Julian; Siebner, Hartwig R; Fosgaard, Toke Reinholt

    2015-04-01

    Decision-making in social dilemmas is suggested to rely on three factors: the valuation of a choice option, the relative judgment of two or more choice alternatives, and individual factors affecting the ease at which judgments and decisions are made. Here, we test whether empathy-an individual's relative ability to understand others' thoughts, emotions, and intentions-acts as an individual factor that alleviates conflict resolution in social decision-making. We test this by using a framed, iterated prisoners' dilemma (PD) game in two settings. In a behavioral experiment, we find that individual differences in empathic ability (the Empathy Quotient, EQ) were related to lower response times in the PD game, suggesting that empathy is related to faster social choices, independent of whether they choose to cooperate or defect. In a subsequent neuroimaging experiment, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we find that EQ is positively related to individual differences in the engagement of brain structures implemented in mentalizing, including the precuneus, superior temporal sulcus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that empathy is related to the individual difference in the engagement of mentalizing in social dilemmas and that this is related to the efficiency of decision-making in social dilemmas.

  10. Intuitive Face Judgments Rely on Holistic Eye Movement Pattern.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mega, Laura F; Volz, Kirsten G

    2017-01-01

    Non-verbal signals such as facial expressions are of paramount importance for social encounters. Their perception predominantly occurs without conscious awareness and is effortlessly integrated into social interactions. In other words, face perception is intuitive. Contrary to classical intuition tasks, this work investigates intuitive processes in the realm of every-day type social judgments. Two differently instructed groups of participants judged the authenticity of emotional facial expressions, while their eye movements were recorded: an 'intuitive group,' instructed to rely on their "gut feeling" for the authenticity judgments, and a 'deliberative group,' instructed to make their judgments after careful analysis of the face. Pixel-wise statistical maps of the resulting eye movements revealed a differential viewing pattern, wherein the intuitive judgments relied on fewer, longer and more centrally located fixations. These markers have been associated with a global/holistic viewing strategy. The holistic pattern of intuitive face judgments is in line with evidence showing that intuition is related to processing the "gestalt" of an object, rather than focusing on details. Our work thereby provides further evidence that intuitive processes are characterized by holistic perception, in an understudied and real world domain of intuition research.

  11. The impact of autism spectrum disorder and alexithymia on judgments of moral acceptability.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Brewer, Rebecca; Marsh, Abigail A; Catmur, Caroline; Cardinale, Elise M; Stoycos, Sarah; Cook, Richard; Bird, Geoffrey

    2015-08-01

    One's own emotional response toward a hypothetical action can influence judgments of its moral acceptability. Some individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit atypical emotional processing, and moral judgments. Research suggests, however, that emotional deficits in ASD are due to co-occurring alexithymia, meaning atypical moral judgments in ASD may be due to alexithymia also. Individuals with and without ASD (matched for alexithymia) judged the moral acceptability of emotion-evoking statements and identified the emotion evoked. Moral acceptability judgments were predicted by alexithymia. Crucially, however, this relationship held only for individuals without ASD. While ASD diagnostic status did not directly predict either judgment, those with ASD did not base their moral acceptability judgments on emotional information. Findings are consistent with evidence demonstrating that decision-making is less subject to emotional biases in those with ASD. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

  12. Decision making under ambiguity and under risk in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Delazer, Margarete; Zamarian, Laura; Bonatti, Elisabeth; Kuchukhidze, Giorgi; Koppelstätter, Florian; Bodner, Thomas; Benke, Thomas; Trinka, Eugen

    2010-01-01

    Decision making is essential in everyday life. Though the importance of the mesial temporal lobe in emotional processing and feedback learning is generally recognized, decision making in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) is almost unexplored so far. Twenty-eight consecutive epilepsy patients with drug resistant mTLE and fifty healthy controls performed decision tasks under initial ambiguity (participants have to learn by feedback to make advantageous decisions) and under risk (advantageous choices may be made by estimating risks and by rational strategies). A subgroup analysis compared the performance of patients affected by MRI-verified abnormalities of the hippocampus or amygdala. The effect of lesion side was also assessed. In decision under ambiguity, mTLE patients showed marked deficits and did not improve over the task. Patients with hippocampus abnormality and patients with amygdala abnormality showed comparable deficits. No difference was found between right and left TLE groups. In decision under risk, mTLE patients performed at the same level as controls. Results suggest that mTLE patients have difficulties in learning from feedback and in making decisions in uncertain, ambiguous situations. By contrast, they are able to make advantageous decisions when full information is given and risks, possible gains and losses are exactly defined.

  13. 40 CFR 86.1851-01 - Application of good engineering judgment to manufacturers' decisions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... engineering judgment in making all decisions called for under this subpart, including but not limited to... overlooked, that the decision was not made in good faith, or that the decision was not made with a rational... judgment to manufacturers' decisions. 86.1851-01 Section 86.1851-01 Protection of Environment ENVIRONMENTAL...

  14. Exposure influences expressive timing judgments in music

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Honing, H.; Ladinig, O.

    2009-01-01

    This study is concerned with the question whether, and to what extent, listeners' previous exposure to music in everyday life, and expertise as a result of formal musical training, play a role in making expressive timing judgments in music. This was investigated by using a Web-based listening

  15. A coordination class analysis of college students' judgments about animated motion

    Science.gov (United States)

    Thaden-Koch, Thomas Christian

    The coordination class construct was invented by di5essa and Sherin to clarify what it means to learn and use scientific concepts. A coordination class is defined to consist of readout strategies, which guide observation, and the causal net, which contains knowledge necessary for making inferences from observations. A coordination class, as originally specified, reliably extracts a certain class of information from a variety of situations. The coordination class construct is relatively new. To examine its utility, transcripts of interviews with college students were analyzed in terms of the coordination class construct. In the interviews, students judged the realism of several computer animations depicting balls rolling on a pair of tracks. When shown animations with only one ball, students made judgments consistent with focusing on the ball's speed changes. Adding a second ball to each animation strongly affected judgments made by students taking introductory physics courses, but had a smaller effect on judgments made by students taking a psychology course. Reasoning was described in this analysis as the coordination of readouts about animations with causal net elements related to realistic motion. Decision-making was characterized both for individual students and for groups by the causal net elements expressed, by the types of readouts reported, and by the coordination processes involved. The coordination class construct was found useful for describing the elements and processes of student decision-making, but little evidence was found to suggest that the students studied possessed reliable coordination classes. Students' causal nets were found to include several appropriate expectations about realistic motion. Several students reached judgments that appeared contrary to their expectations and reported mutually incompatible expectations. Descriptions of students' decision-making processes often included faulty readouts, or feedback loops in which causal net

  16. Can model-free reinforcement learning explain deontological moral judgments?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ayars, Alisabeth

    2016-05-01

    Dual-systems frameworks propose that moral judgments are derived from both an immediate emotional response, and controlled/rational cognition. Recently Cushman (2013) proposed a new dual-system theory based on model-free and model-based reinforcement learning. Model-free learning attaches values to actions based on their history of reward and punishment, and explains some deontological, non-utilitarian judgments. Model-based learning involves the construction of a causal model of the world and allows for far-sighted planning; this form of learning fits well with utilitarian considerations that seek to maximize certain kinds of outcomes. I present three concerns regarding the use of model-free reinforcement learning to explain deontological moral judgment. First, many actions that humans find aversive from model-free learning are not judged to be morally wrong. Moral judgment must require something in addition to model-free learning. Second, there is a dearth of evidence for central predictions of the reinforcement account-e.g., that people with different reinforcement histories will, all else equal, make different moral judgments. Finally, to account for the effect of intention within the framework requires certain assumptions which lack support. These challenges are reasonable foci for future empirical/theoretical work on the model-free/model-based framework. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  17. Intuitive Face Judgments Rely on Holistic Eye Movement Pattern

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Laura F. Mega

    2017-06-01

    Full Text Available Non-verbal signals such as facial expressions are of paramount importance for social encounters. Their perception predominantly occurs without conscious awareness and is effortlessly integrated into social interactions. In other words, face perception is intuitive. Contrary to classical intuition tasks, this work investigates intuitive processes in the realm of every-day type social judgments. Two differently instructed groups of participants judged the authenticity of emotional facial expressions, while their eye movements were recorded: an ‘intuitive group,’ instructed to rely on their “gut feeling” for the authenticity judgments, and a ‘deliberative group,’ instructed to make their judgments after careful analysis of the face. Pixel-wise statistical maps of the resulting eye movements revealed a differential viewing pattern, wherein the intuitive judgments relied on fewer, longer and more centrally located fixations. These markers have been associated with a global/holistic viewing strategy. The holistic pattern of intuitive face judgments is in line with evidence showing that intuition is related to processing the “gestalt” of an object, rather than focusing on details. Our work thereby provides further evidence that intuitive processes are characterized by holistic perception, in an understudied and real world domain of intuition research.

  18. Impact of Psychopathy on Moral Judgments about Causing Fear and Physical Harm.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Elise M Cardinale

    Full Text Available Psychopathy is a personality variable associated with persistent immoral behaviors. Despite this, attempts to link moral reasoning deficits to psychopathic traits have yielded mixed results with many findings supporting intact moral reasoning in individuals with psychopathic traits. Abundant evidence shows that psychopathy impairs responses to others' emotional distress. However, most studies of morality and psychopathy focus on judgments about causing others physical harm. Results of such studies may be inconsistent because physical harm is an imperfect proxy for emotional distress. No previous paradigm has explicitly separated judgments about physical harm and emotional distress and assessed how psychopathy affects each type of judgment. In three studies we found that psychopathy impairs judgments about causing others emotional distress (specifically fear but minimally affects judgments about causing physical harm and that judgments about causing fear predict instrumental aggression in psychopathy. These findings are consistent with reports linking psychopathy to insensitivity to others' fear, and suggest that sensitivity to others' fear may play a fundamental role in the types of moral decision-making impaired by psychopathy.

  19. The Temporal Derivative of Expected Utility: A Neural Mechanism for Dynamic Decision-making

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Xian; Hirsch, Joy

    2012-01-01

    Real world tasks involving moving targets, such as driving a vehicle, are performed based on continuous decisions thought to depend upon the temporal derivative of the expected utility (∂V/∂t), where the expected utility (V) is the effective value of a future reward. However, those neural mechanisms that underlie dynamic decision-making are not well understood. This study investigates human neural correlates of both V and ∂V/∂t using fMRI and a novel experimental paradigm based on a pursuit-evasion game optimized to isolate components of dynamic decision processes. Our behavioral data show that players of the pursuit-evasion game adopt an exponential discounting function, supporting the expected utility theory. The continuous functions of V and ∂V/∂t were derived from the behavioral data and applied as regressors in fMRI analysis, enabling temporal resolution that exceeded the sampling rate of image acquisition, hyper-temporal resolution, by taking advantage of numerous trials that provide rich and independent manipulation of those variables. V and ∂V/∂t were each associated with distinct neural activity. Specifically, ∂V/∂t was associated with anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, superior parietal lobule, and ventral pallidum, whereas V was primarily associated with supplementary motor, pre and post central gyri, cerebellum, and thalamus. The association between the ∂V/∂t and brain regions previously related to decision-making is consistent with the primary role of the temporal derivative of expected utility in dynamic decision-making. PMID:22963852

  20. The temporal derivative of expected utility: a neural mechanism for dynamic decision-making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Xian; Hirsch, Joy

    2013-01-15

    Real world tasks involving moving targets, such as driving a vehicle, are performed based on continuous decisions thought to depend upon the temporal derivative of the expected utility (∂V/∂t), where the expected utility (V) is the effective value of a future reward. However, the neural mechanisms that underlie dynamic decision-making are not well understood. This study investigates human neural correlates of both V and ∂V/∂t using fMRI and a novel experimental paradigm based on a pursuit-evasion game optimized to isolate components of dynamic decision processes. Our behavioral data show that players of the pursuit-evasion game adopt an exponential discounting function, supporting the expected utility theory. The continuous functions of V and ∂V/∂t were derived from the behavioral data and applied as regressors in fMRI analysis, enabling temporal resolution that exceeded the sampling rate of image acquisition, hyper-temporal resolution, by taking advantage of numerous trials that provide rich and independent manipulation of those variables. V and ∂V/∂t were each associated with distinct neural activity. Specifically, ∂V/∂t was associated with anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, superior parietal lobule, and ventral pallidum, whereas V was primarily associated with supplementary motor, pre and post central gyri, cerebellum, and thalamus. The association between the ∂V/∂t and brain regions previously related to decision-making is consistent with the primary role of the temporal derivative of expected utility in dynamic decision-making. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  1. Culture and Probability Judgment Accuracy: The Influence of Holistic Reasoning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lechuga, Julia; Wiebe, John S

    2011-08-01

    A well-established phenomenon in the judgment and decision-making tradition is the overconfidence one places in the amount of knowledge that one possesses. Overconfidence or probability judgment accuracy varies not only individually but also across cultures. However, research efforts to explain cross-cultural variations in the overconfidence phenomenon have seldom been made. In Study 1, the authors compared the probability judgment accuracy of U.S. Americans (N = 108) and Mexican participants (N = 100). In Study 2, they experimentally primed culture by randomly assigning English/Spanish bilingual Mexican Americans (N = 195) to response language. Results of both studies replicated the cross-cultural variation of probability judgment accuracy previously observed in other cultural groups. U.S. Americans displayed less overconfidence when compared to Mexicans. These results were then replicated in bilingual participants, when culture was experimentally manipulated with language priming. Holistic reasoning did not account for the cross-cultural variation of overconfidence. Suggestions for future studies are discussed.

  2. Simultaneous perceptual and response biases on sequential face attractiveness judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pegors, Teresa K.; Mattar, Marcelo G.; Bryan, Peter B.; Epstein, Russell A.

    2015-01-01

    Face attractiveness is a social characteristic that we often use to make first-pass judgments about the people around us. However, these judgments are highly influenced by our surrounding social world, and researchers still understand little about the mechanisms underlying these influences. In a series of three experiments, we used a novel sequential rating paradigm that enabled us to measure biases on attractiveness judgments from the previous face and the previous rating. Our results revealed two simultaneous and opposing influences on face attractiveness judgments that arise from our past experience of faces: a response bias in which attractiveness ratings shift towards a previously given rating, and a stimulus bias in which attractiveness ratings shift away from the mean attractiveness of the previous face. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the contrastive stimulus bias (but not the assimilative response bias) is strengthened by increasing the duration of the previous stimulus, suggesting an underlying perceptual mechanism. These results demonstrate that judgments of face attractiveness are influenced by information from our evaluative and perceptual history and that these influences have measurable behavioral effects over the course of just a few seconds. PMID:25867223

  3. Self-Reflection of Video-Recorded High-Fidelity Simulations and Development of Clinical Judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bussard, Michelle E

    2016-09-01

    Nurse educators are increasingly using high-fidelity simulators to improve prelicensure nursing students' ability to develop clinical judgment. Traditionally, oral debriefing sessions have immediately followed the simulation scenarios as a method for students to connect theory to practice and therefore develop clinical judgment. Recently, video recording of the simulation scenarios is being incorporated. This qualitative, interpretive description study was conducted to identify whether self-reflection on video-recorded high-fidelity simulation (HFS) scenarios helped prelicensure nursing students to develop clinical judgment. Tanner's clinical judgment model was the framework for this study. Four themes emerged from this study: Confidence, Communication, Decision Making, and Change in Clinical Practice. This study indicated that self-reflection of video-recorded HFS scenarios is beneficial for prelicensure nursing students to develop clinical judgment. [J Nurs Educ. 2016;55(9):522-527.]. Copyright 2016, SLACK Incorporated.

  4. Making Decisions under Ambiguity : Judgment Bias Tasks for Assessing Emotional State in Animals

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Roelofs, Sanne|info:eu-repo/dai/nl/413320626; Boleij, Hetty|info:eu-repo/dai/nl/315028815; Nordquist, Rebecca E|info:eu-repo/dai/nl/296303291; van der Staay, Franz Josef|info:eu-repo/dai/nl/074262653

    2016-01-01

    Judgment bias tasks (JBTs) are considered as a family of promising tools in the assessment of emotional states of animals. JBTs provide a cognitive measure of optimism and/or pessimism by recording behavioral responses to ambiguous stimuli. For instance, a negative emotional state is expected to

  5. Emotion and moral judgment

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Avramova, Y.R.; Inbar, Y.

    2013-01-01

    Research in psychology and cognitive science has consistently demonstrated the importance of emotion in a wide range of everyday judgments, including moral judgment. Most current accounts of moral judgment hold that emotion plays an important role, but the nature and extent of this role are still

  6. Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Youyou, Wu; Kosinski, Michal; Stillwell, David

    2015-01-27

    Judging others' personalities is an essential skill in successful social living, as personality is a key driver behind people's interactions, behaviors, and emotions. Although accurate personality judgments stem from social-cognitive skills, developments in machine learning show that computer models can also make valid judgments. This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants' Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49); (ii) computer models show higher interjudge agreement; and (iii) computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores. Computers outpacing humans in personality judgment presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing, and privacy.

  7. Integrative moral judgment: dissociating the roles of the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shenhav, Amitai; Greene, Joshua D

    2014-03-26

    A decade's research highlights a critical dissociation between automatic and controlled influences on moral judgment, which is subserved by distinct neural structures. Specifically, negative automatic emotional responses to prototypically harmful actions (e.g., pushing someone off of a footbridge) compete with controlled responses favoring the best consequences (e.g., saving five lives instead of one). It is unknown how such competitions are resolved to yield "all things considered" judgments. Here, we examine such integrative moral judgments. Drawing on insights from research on self-interested, value-based decision-making in humans and animals, we test a theory concerning the respective contributions of the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) to moral judgment. Participants undergoing fMRI responded to moral dilemmas, separately evaluating options for their utility (Which does the most good?), emotional aversiveness (Which feels worse?), and overall moral acceptability. Behavioral data indicate that emotional aversiveness and utility jointly predict "all things considered" integrative judgments. Amygdala response tracks the emotional aversiveness of harmful utilitarian actions and overall disapproval of such actions. During such integrative moral judgments, the vmPFC is preferentially engaged relative to utilitarian and emotional assessments. Amygdala-vmPFC connectivity varies with the role played by emotional input in the task, being the lowest for pure utilitarian assessments and the highest for pure emotional assessments. These findings, which parallel those of research on self-interested economic decision-making, support the hypothesis that the amygdala provides an affective assessment of the action in question, whereas the vmPFC integrates that signal with a utilitarian assessment of expected outcomes to yield "all things considered" moral judgments.

  8. Non-retinotopic motor-visual recalibration to temporal lag

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Masaki eTsujita

    2012-11-01

    Full Text Available Temporal order judgment between the voluntary motor action and its perceptual feedback is important in distinguishing between a sensory feedback which is caused by observer’s own action and other stimulus, which are irrelevant to that action. Prolonged exposure to fixed temporal lag between motor action and visual feedback recalibrates motor-visual temporal relationship, and consequently shifts the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS. Previous studies on the audio-visual temporal recalibration without voluntary action revealed that both low and high level processing are involved. However, it is not clear how the low and high level processings affect the recalibration to constant temporal lag between voluntary action and visual feedback. This study examined retinotopic specificity of the motor-visual temporal recalibration. During the adaptation phase, observers repeatedly pressed a key, and visual stimulus was presented in left or right visual field with a fixed temporal lag (0 or 200 ms. In the test phase, observers performed a temporal order judgment for observer’s voluntary keypress and test stimulus, which was presented in the same as or opposite to the visual field in which the stimulus was presented in the adaptation phase. We found that the PSS was shifted toward the exposed lag in both visual fields. These results suggest that the low visual processing, which is retinotopically specific, has minor contribution to the multimodal adaptation, and that the adaptation to shift the PSS mainly depends upon the high level processing such as attention to specific properties of the stimulus.

  9. Making oneself predictable: Reduced temporal variability facilitates joint action coordination

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Vesper, Cordula; van der Wel, Robrecht; Knoblich, Günther

    2011-01-01

    Performing joint actions often requires precise temporal coordination of individual actions. The present study investigated how people coordinate their actions at discrete points in time when continuous or rhythmic information about others’ actions is not available. In particular, we tested...... the hypothesis that making oneself predictable is used as a coordination strategy. Pairs of participants were instructed to coordinate key presses in a two-choice reaction time task, either responding in synchrony (Experiments 1 and 2) or in close temporal succession (Experiment 3). Across all experiments, we...... found that coactors reduced the variability of their actions in the joint context compared with the same task performed individually. Correlation analyses indicated that the less variable the actions were, the better was interpersonal coordination. The relation between reduced variability and improved...

  10. Temporal Dissociation of Neocortical and Hippocampal Contributions to Mental Time Travel Using Intracranial Recordings in Humans

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Roey Schurr

    2018-02-01

    Full Text Available In mental time travel (MTT one is “traveling” back-and-forth in time, remembering, and imagining events. Despite intensive research regarding memory processes in the hippocampus, it was only recently shown that the hippocampus plays an essential role in encoding the temporal order of events remembered, and therefore plays an important role in MTT. Does it also encode the temporal relations of these events to the remembering self? We asked patients undergoing pre-surgical evaluation with depth electrodes penetrating the temporal lobes bilaterally toward the hippocampus to project themselves in time to a past, future, or present time-point, and then make judgments regarding various events. Classification analysis of intracranial evoked potentials revealed clear temporal dissociation in the left hemisphere between lateral-temporal electrodes, activated at ~100–300 ms, and hippocampal electrodes, activated at ~400–600 ms. This dissociation may suggest a division of labor in the temporal lobe during self-projection in time, hinting toward the different roles of the lateral-temporal cortex and the hippocampus in MTT and the temporal organization of the related events with respect to the experiencing self.

  11. Co-workers' Justice Judgments, own Justice Judgments and Employee Commitment: A multi-foci approach

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Florence Stinglhamber

    2008-06-01

    Full Text Available Using a sample of 212 employees, we conducted a study to examine whether employees use their co-workers' fairness perceptions to generate their own justice judgments and to develop their subsequent affective commitment. The conceptual framework used to investigate these linkages is social exchange theory combined with a multiple foci approach. Results of the structural equation modeling analyses revealed that co-workers' procedural justice judgments strengthened employee's own procedural justice judgments, which in turn influenced their affective commitment to the organisation. Similarly, co-workers' interactional justice judgments increased employee's own interactional justice judgments, which in turn impacted on their affective commitment to both the supervisor and the organisation. As a whole, findings suggest that coworkers' justice judgments strengthened employee's affective attachments toward the justice sources by reinforcing employee's own justice perceptions.

  12. Exposure Influences Expressive Timing Judgments in Music

    Science.gov (United States)

    Honing, Henkjan; Ladinig, Olivia

    2009-01-01

    This study is concerned with the question whether, and to what extent, listeners' previous exposure to music in everyday life, and expertise as a result of formal musical training, play a role in making expressive timing judgments in music. This was investigated by using a Web-based listening experiment in which listeners with a wide range of…

  13. Human processing of short temporal intervals as revealed by an ERP waveform analysis

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yoshitaka eNakajima

    2011-12-01

    Full Text Available To clarify the time course over which the human brain processes information about durations up to ~300 ms, we reanalyzed the data that were previously reported by Mitsudo et al. (2009 using a multivariate analysis method. Event-related potentials were recorded from 19 scalp electrodes on 11 (9 original and 2 additional participants while they judged whether two neighboring empty time intervals—called t1 and t2 and marked by three tone bursts—had equal durations. There was also a control condition in which the participants were presented the same temporal patterns but without a judgment task. In the present reanalysis, we sought to visualize how the temporal patterns were represented in the brain over time. A correlation matrix across channels was calculated for each temporal pattern. Geometric separations between the correlation matrices were calculated, and subjected to multidimensional scaling. We performed such analyses for a moving 100-ms time window after the t1 presentations. In the windows centered at < 100 ms after the t2 presentation, the analyses revealed the local maxima of categorical separation between temporal patterns of perceptually equal durations versus perceptually unequal durations, both in the judgment condition and in the control condition. Such categorization of the temporal patterns was prominent only in narrow temporal regions. The analysis indicated that the participants determined whether the two neighboring time intervals were of equal duration mostly within 100 ms after the presentation of the temporal patterns. A very fast brain activity was related to the perception of elementary temporal patterns without explicit judgments. This is consistent with the findings of Mitsudo et al., and it is in line with the processing time hypothesis proposed by Nakajima et al. (2004. The validity of the correlation matrix analyses turned out to be an effective tool to grasp the overall responses of the brain to temporal

  14. Effects of Incidental Emotions on Moral Dilemma Judgments: An Analysis Using the CNI Model.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gawronski, Bertram; Conway, Paul; Armstrong, Joel; Friesdorf, Rebecca; Hütter, Mandy

    2018-02-01

    Effects of incidental emotions on moral dilemma judgments have garnered interest because they demonstrate the context-dependent nature of moral decision-making. Six experiments (N = 727) investigated the effects of incidental happiness, sadness, and anger on responses in moral dilemmas that pit the consequences of a given action for the greater good (i.e., utilitarianism) against the consistency of that action with moral norms (i.e., deontology). Using the CNI model of moral decision-making, we further tested whether the three kinds of emotions shape moral dilemma judgments by influencing (a) sensitivity to consequences, (b) sensitivity to moral norms, or (c) general preference for inaction versus action regardless of consequences and moral norms (or some combination of the three). Incidental happiness reduced sensitivity to moral norms without affecting sensitivity to consequences or general preference for inaction versus action. Incidental sadness and incidental anger did not show any significant effects on moral dilemma judgments. The findings suggest a central role of moral norms in the contribution of emotional responses to moral dilemma judgments, requiring refinements of dominant theoretical accounts and supporting the value of formal modeling approaches in providing more nuanced insights into the determinants of moral dilemma judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

  15. Expert Intraoperative Judgment and Decision-Making: Defining the Cognitive Competencies for Safe Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Madani, Amin; Watanabe, Yusuke; Feldman, Liane S; Vassiliou, Melina C; Barkun, Jeffrey S; Fried, Gerald M; Aggarwal, Rajesh

    2015-11-01

    Bile duct injuries from laparoscopic cholecystectomy remain a significant source of morbidity and are often the result of intraoperative errors in perception, judgment, and decision-making. This qualitative study aimed to define and characterize higher-order cognitive competencies required to safely perform a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Hierarchical and cognitive task analyses for establishing a critical view of safety during laparoscopic cholecystectomy were performed using qualitative methods to map the thoughts and practices that characterize expert performance. Experts with more than 5 years of experience, and who have performed at least 100 laparoscopic cholecystectomies, participated in semi-structured interviews and field observations. Verbal data were transcribed verbatim, supplemented with content from published literature, coded, thematically analyzed using grounded-theory by 2 independent reviewers, and synthesized into a list of items. A conceptual framework was created based on 10 interviews with experts, 9 procedures, and 18 literary sources. Experts included 6 minimally invasive surgeons, 2 hepato-pancreatico-biliary surgeons, and 2 acute care general surgeons (median years in practice, 11 [range 8 to 14]). One hundred eight cognitive elements (35 [32%] related to situation awareness, 47 [44%] involving decision-making, and 26 [24%] action-oriented subtasks) and 75 potential errors were identified and categorized into 6 general themes and 14 procedural tasks. Of the 75 potential errors, root causes were mapped to errors in situation awareness (24 [32%]), decision-making (49 [65%]), or either one (61 [81%]). This study defines the competencies that are essential to establishing a critical view of safety and avoiding bile duct injuries during laparoscopic cholecystectomy. This framework may serve as the basis for instructional design, assessment tools, and quality-control metrics to prevent injuries and promote a culture of patient safety. Copyright

  16. Using fuzzy-trace theory to understand and improve health judgments, decisions, and behaviors: A literature review.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Blalock, Susan J; Reyna, Valerie F

    2016-08-01

    Fuzzy-trace theory is a dual-process model of memory, reasoning, judgment, and decision making that contrasts with traditional expectancy-value approaches. We review the literature applying fuzzy-trace theory to health with 3 aims: evaluating whether the theory's basic distinctions have been validated empirically in the domain of health; determining whether these distinctions are useful in assessing, explaining, and predicting health-related psychological processes; and determining whether the theory can be used to improve health judgments, decisions, or behaviors, especially compared to other approaches. We conducted a literature review using PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science to identify empirical peer-reviewed papers that applied fuzzy-trace theory, or central constructs of the theory, to investigate health judgments, decisions, or behaviors. Seventy nine studies (updated total is 94 studies; see Supplemental materials) were identified, over half published since 2012, spanning a wide variety of conditions and populations. Study findings supported the prediction that verbatim and gist representations are distinct constructs that can be retrieved independently using different cues. Although gist-based reasoning was usually associated with improved judgment and decision making, 4 sources of bias that can impair gist reasoning were identified. Finally, promising findings were reported from intervention studies that used fuzzy-trace theory to improve decision making and decrease unhealthy risk taking. Despite large gaps in the literature, most studies supported all 3 aims. By focusing on basic psychological processes that underlie judgment and decision making, fuzzy-trace theory provides insights into how individuals make decisions involving health risks and suggests innovative intervention approaches to improve health outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

  17. A note on the statistical analysis of point judgment matrices

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    MG Kabera

    2013-06-01

    Full Text Available The Analytic Hierarchy Process is a multicriteria decision making technique developed by Saaty in the 1970s. The core of the approach is the pairwise comparison of objects according to a single criterion using a 9-point ratio scale and the estimation of weights associated with these objects based on the resultant judgment matrix. In the present paper some statistical approaches to extracting the weights of objects from a judgment matrix are reviewed and new ideas which are rooted in the traditional method of paired comparisons are introduced.

  18. Information order and outcome framing: an assesment of judgment bias in a naturalistic decision-making context.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Perrin, B M; Barnett, B J; Walrath, L; Grossman, J D

    2001-01-01

    Findings that decision makers can come to different conclusions depending on the order in which they receive information have been termed the "information order bias." When trained, experienced individuals exhibit similar behaviors; however, it has been argued that this result is not a bias, but rather, a pattern-matching process. This study provides a critical examination of this claim. It also assesses both experts' susceptibility to an outcome framing bias and the effects of varying task loads on judgment. Using a simulation of state-of-the-art ship defensive systems operated by experienced, active-duty U.S. Navy officers, we found no evidence of a framing bias, while task load had a minor, but systematic effect. The order in which information was received had a significant impact, with the effect being consistent with a judgment bias. Nonetheless, we note that pattern-matching processes, similar to those that produce inferential and reconstructive effects on memory, could also explain our results. Actual or potential applications of this research include decision support system interfaces or training programs that might be developed to reduce judgment bias.

  19. Effect of emotional arousal on inter-temporal decision-making: an fMRI study

    OpenAIRE

    Sohn, Jin-Hun; Kim, Hyo-Eun; Sohn, Sunju; Seok, Ji-Woo; Choi, Damee; Watanuki, Shigeki

    2015-01-01

    Background Previous research has shown that emotion can significantly impact decision-making in humans. The current study examined whether or not and how situationally induced emotion influences people to make inter-temporal choices. Methods Affective pictures were used as experiment stimuli to provoke emotion, immediately followed by subjects? performance of a delay-discounting task to measure impulsivity during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Results Results demonstrate a subsequent ...

  20. Medical decision making

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Stiggelbout, A.M.; Vries, M. de; Scherer, L.; Keren, G.; Wu, G.

    2016-01-01

    This chapter presents an overview of the field of medical decision making. It distinguishes the levels of decision making seen in health-care practice and shows how research in judgment and decision making support or improve decision making. Most of the research has been done at the micro level,

  1. Cold-Hearted or Cool-Headed: Physical Coldness Promotes Utilitarian Moral Judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Hiroko eNakamura

    2014-10-01

    Full Text Available In the current study, we examine the effect of physical coldness on personal moral dilemma judgment. Previous studies have indicated that utilitarian moral judgment—sacrificing a few people to achieve the greater good for others—was facilitated when: (1 participants suppressed an initial emotional response and deliberately thought about the utility of outcomes; (2 participants had a high-level construal mindset and focused on abstract goals (e.g., save many; or (3 there was a decreasing emotional response to sacrificing a few. In two experiments, we exposed participants to extreme cold or typical room temperature and then asked them to make personal moral dilemma judgments. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that coldness prompted utilitarian judgment, but the effect of coldness was independent from deliberate thought or abstract high-level construal mindset. As Experiment 2 revealed, coldness facilitated utilitarian judgment via reduced empathic feelings. Therefore, physical coldness did not affect the cool-headed deliberate process or the abstract high-level construal mindset. Rather, coldness biased people toward being cold-hearted, reduced empathetic concern about a sacrificed victim, and facilitated utilitarian moral judgments.

  2. Video game players show more precise multisensory temporal processing abilities.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Donohue, Sarah E; Woldorff, Marty G; Mitroff, Stephen R

    2010-05-01

    Recent research has demonstrated enhanced visual attention and visual perception in individuals with extensive experience playing action video games. These benefits manifest in several realms, but much remains unknown about the ways in which video game experience alters perception and cognition. In the present study, we examined whether video game players' benefits generalize beyond vision to multisensory processing by presenting auditory and visual stimuli within a short temporal window to video game players and non-video game players. Participants performed two discrimination tasks, both of which revealed benefits for video game players: In a simultaneity judgment task, video game players were better able to distinguish whether simple visual and auditory stimuli occurred at the same moment or slightly offset in time, and in a temporal-order judgment task, they revealed an enhanced ability to determine the temporal sequence of multisensory stimuli. These results suggest that people with extensive experience playing video games display benefits that extend beyond the visual modality to also impact multisensory processing.

  3. Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans

    Science.gov (United States)

    Youyou, Wu; Kosinski, Michal; Stillwell, David

    2015-01-01

    Judging others’ personalities is an essential skill in successful social living, as personality is a key driver behind people’s interactions, behaviors, and emotions. Although accurate personality judgments stem from social-cognitive skills, developments in machine learning show that computer models can also make valid judgments. This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants’ Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49); (ii) computer models show higher interjudge agreement; and (iii) computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores. Computers outpacing humans in personality judgment presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing, and privacy. PMID:25583507

  4. Not that neglected! Base rates influence related and unrelated judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Białek, Michał

    2017-06-01

    It is claimed that people are unable (or unwilling) to incorporate prior probabilities into posterior assessments, such as their estimation of the likelihood of a person with characteristics typical of an engineer actually being an engineer given that they are drawn from a sample including a very small number of engineers. This paper shows that base rates are incorporated in classifications (Experiment 1) and, moreover, that base rates also affect unrelated judgments, such as how well a provided description of a person fits a stereotypical engineer (Experiment 2). Finally, Experiment 3 shows that individuals who make both types of assessments - though using base rates to the same extent in the former judgments - are able to decrease the extent to which they incorporate base rates in the latter judgments. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  5. Alexithymia tendencies and mere exposure alter social approachability judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Campbell, Darren W; McKeen, Nancy A

    2011-04-01

    People have a fundamental motivation for social connection and social engagement, but how do they decide whom to approach in ambiguous social situations? Subjective feelings often influence such decisions, but people vary in awareness of their feelings. We evaluated two opposing hypotheses based on visual familiarity effects and emotional awareness on social approachability judgments. These hypotheses differ in their interpretation of the familiarity or mere exposure effect with either an affective or cognitive interpretation. The responses of our 128-student sample supported the cognitive interpretation. Lower emotional awareness or higher alexithymia was associated with higher approachability judgments to familiarized faces and lower approachability judgments to novel faces. These findings were independent of the Big Five personality factors. The results indicate that individual differences in emotional awareness should be integrated into social decision-making models. The results also suggest that cognitive-perceptual alterations may underlie the poorer social outcomes associated with alexithymia. © 2011 The Authors. Journal of Personality © 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  6. Policy issues arising from the judgmental nature of risk-based decision making

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Mcquaid, J.

    1998-01-01

    The regulation of risks is pervaded by the need to exercise judgement. The scientific basis for characterising risk problems and judging the effectiveness of possible controls is often uncertain, lacking information and understanding of the processes involved. However, the risk management measures adopted will not be determined by science alone, but must reflect sociological, economic, ethical and political considerations. These in turn are in themselves judgmental, informed to a greater or lesser extent by empirical evidence and influenced by the prevailing climate of public opinion. The overall process provides a rich source of confusion for the public as to the status of the eventual policy decision, with important implications for the manner in which the process of communication is managed. The important role of judgement, as distinct from formal analysis, at every stage needs to be reflected in risk communication. The engagement of those who bear the risks, and of other interested parties in the exercise of judgement must be tailored to nature of the judgement and to the decision to be made. Appropriate procedures need to be adopted to enable that engagement. Although the issue has come into particular prominence in recent years, it is not a new phenomenon. The presentation will describe the arrangements that have been developed in the UK over the past 25 years, and will be illustrated by some specific examples of risk decision making on issues of high public concern. (author)

  7. Temporal Ventriloquism Reveals Intact Audiovisual Temporal Integration in Amblyopia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Richards, Michael D; Goltz, Herbert C; Wong, Agnes M F

    2018-02-01

    We have shown previously that amblyopia involves impaired detection of asynchrony between auditory and visual events. To distinguish whether this impairment represents a defect in temporal integration or nonintegrative multisensory processing (e.g., cross-modal matching), we used the temporal ventriloquism effect in which visual temporal order judgment (TOJ) is normally enhanced by a lagging auditory click. Participants with amblyopia (n = 9) and normally sighted controls (n = 9) performed a visual TOJ task. Pairs of clicks accompanied the two lights such that the first click preceded the first light, or second click lagged the second light by 100, 200, or 450 ms. Baseline audiovisual synchrony and visual-only conditions also were tested. Within both groups, just noticeable differences for the visual TOJ task were significantly reduced compared with baseline in the 100- and 200-ms click lag conditions. Within the amblyopia group, poorer stereo acuity and poorer visual acuity in the amblyopic eye were significantly associated with greater enhancement in visual TOJ performance in the 200-ms click lag condition. Audiovisual temporal integration is intact in amblyopia, as indicated by perceptual enhancement in the temporal ventriloquism effect. Furthermore, poorer stereo acuity and poorer visual acuity in the amblyopic eye are associated with a widened temporal binding window for the effect. These findings suggest that previously reported abnormalities in audiovisual multisensory processing may result from impaired cross-modal matching rather than a diminished capacity for temporal audiovisual integration.

  8. Duration Judgments for Verbal Stimuli: Effects of Emotion, Attention, and Memory Encoding

    OpenAIRE

    Johnson, Laura Wendy

    2014-01-01

    In six experiments, this dissertation investigated duration judgments for verbal stimuli, testing predictions of information-processing models of time perception. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 explored the effects of low-valence, high-arousal taboo words on the perception of time. The results revealed that durations of taboo words were underestimated compared to neutral words in prospective timing tasks, including the temporal bisection task in Experiment 1 and the ordinality comparison procedure ...

  9. Introduction to a Forum on the Judgment-based Approach to Entrepreneurship

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Foss, Nicolai Juul; Klein, Peter G.

    2015-01-01

    Over the last three decades entrepreneurship has become a hot topic in economics and management. Much of the entrepreneurship research literature has built upon insights of economists such as Schumpeter, Knight, and Kirzner, each of whom has inspired a distinct strand of entrepreneurship theory...... and application. Schumpeterian innovation and Kirznerian alertness are the best-known concepts of entrepreneurship, but a newer research stream is building on Knight's idea of entrepreneurship as judgmental decision-making under uncertainty. What we call the judgment-based view models entrepreneurs as owning......, controlling, and combining heterogeneous assets, which differ in their attributes, and deploying these assets within a firm to produce goods and services in anticipation of economic profit. This Forum presents three papers that develop, extend, and challenge the judgment-based view of entrepreneurship...

  10. Realigning thunder and lightning: temporal adaptation to spatiotemporally distant events.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jordi Navarra

    Full Text Available The brain is able to realign asynchronous signals that approximately coincide in both space and time. Given that many experience-based links between visual and auditory stimuli are established in the absence of spatiotemporal proximity, we investigated whether or not temporal realignment arises in these conditions. Participants received a 3-min exposure to visual and auditory stimuli that were separated by 706 ms and appeared either from the same (Experiment 1 or from different spatial positions (Experiment 2. A simultaneity judgment task (SJ was administered right afterwards. Temporal realignment between vision and audition was observed, in both Experiment 1 and 2, when comparing the participants' SJs after this exposure phase with those obtained after a baseline exposure to audiovisual synchrony. However, this effect was present only when the visual stimuli preceded the auditory stimuli during the exposure to asynchrony. A similar pattern of results (temporal realignment after exposure to visual-leading asynchrony but not after exposure to auditory-leading asynchrony was obtained using temporal order judgments (TOJs instead of SJs (Experiment 3. Taken together, these results suggest that temporal recalibration still occurs for visual and auditory stimuli that fall clearly outside the so-called temporal window for multisensory integration and appear from different spatial positions. This temporal realignment may be modulated by long-term experience with the kind of asynchrony (vision-leading that we most frequently encounter in the outside world (e.g., while perceiving distant events.

  11. Audiovisual Temporal Perception in Aging: The Role of Multisensory Integration and Age-Related Sensory Loss.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Brooks, Cassandra J; Chan, Yu Man; Anderson, Andrew J; McKendrick, Allison M

    2018-01-01

    Within each sensory modality, age-related deficits in temporal perception contribute to the difficulties older adults experience when performing everyday tasks. Since perceptual experience is inherently multisensory, older adults also face the added challenge of appropriately integrating or segregating the auditory and visual cues present in our dynamic environment into coherent representations of distinct objects. As such, many studies have investigated how older adults perform when integrating temporal information across audition and vision. This review covers both direct judgments about temporal information (the sound-induced flash illusion, temporal order, perceived synchrony, and temporal rate discrimination) and judgments regarding stimuli containing temporal information (the audiovisual bounce effect and speech perception). Although an age-related increase in integration has been demonstrated on a variety of tasks, research specifically investigating the ability of older adults to integrate temporal auditory and visual cues has produced disparate results. In this short review, we explore what factors could underlie these divergent findings. We conclude that both task-specific differences and age-related sensory loss play a role in the reported disparity in age-related effects on the integration of auditory and visual temporal information.

  12. Audiovisual Temporal Perception in Aging: The Role of Multisensory Integration and Age-Related Sensory Loss

    Science.gov (United States)

    Brooks, Cassandra J.; Chan, Yu Man; Anderson, Andrew J.; McKendrick, Allison M.

    2018-01-01

    Within each sensory modality, age-related deficits in temporal perception contribute to the difficulties older adults experience when performing everyday tasks. Since perceptual experience is inherently multisensory, older adults also face the added challenge of appropriately integrating or segregating the auditory and visual cues present in our dynamic environment into coherent representations of distinct objects. As such, many studies have investigated how older adults perform when integrating temporal information across audition and vision. This review covers both direct judgments about temporal information (the sound-induced flash illusion, temporal order, perceived synchrony, and temporal rate discrimination) and judgments regarding stimuli containing temporal information (the audiovisual bounce effect and speech perception). Although an age-related increase in integration has been demonstrated on a variety of tasks, research specifically investigating the ability of older adults to integrate temporal auditory and visual cues has produced disparate results. In this short review, we explore what factors could underlie these divergent findings. We conclude that both task-specific differences and age-related sensory loss play a role in the reported disparity in age-related effects on the integration of auditory and visual temporal information. PMID:29867415

  13. Interwoven fluctuations during intermodal perception: fractality in head sway supports the use of visual feedback in haptic perceptual judgments by manual wielding.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kelty-Stephen, Damian G; Dixon, James A

    2014-12-01

    Intermodal integration required for perceptual learning tasks is rife with individual differences. Participants vary in how they use perceptual information to one modality. One participant alone might change her own response over time. Participants vary further in their use of feedback through one modality to inform another modality. Two experiments test the general hypothesis that perceptual-motor fluctuations reveal both information use within modality and coordination among modalities. Experiment 1 focuses on perceptual learning in dynamic touch, in which participants use exploratory hand-wielding of unseen objects to make visually guided length judgments and use visual feedback to rescale their judgments of the same mechanical information. Previous research found that the degree of fractal temporal scaling (i.e., "fractality") in hand-wielding moderates the use of mechanical information. Experiment 1 shows that head-sway fractality moderates the use of visual information. Further, experience with feedback increases head-sway fractality and prolongs its effect on later hand-wielding fractality. Experiment 2 replicates effects of head-sway fractality moderating use of visual information in a purely visual-judgment task. Together, these findings suggest that fractal fluctuations may provide a modal-general window onto not just how participants use perceptual information but also how well they may integrate information among different modalities. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

  14. Remember and Know Judgments During Recognition in Chronic Schizophrenia

    Science.gov (United States)

    van Erp, Theo G.M.; Lesh, Tyler A.; Knowlton, Barbara J.; Bearden, Carrie E.; Hardt, Molly; Karlsgodt, Katherine H.; Shirinyan, David; Rao, Vikas; Green, Michael F.; Subotnik, Kenneth L.; Nuechterlein, Keith; Cannon, Tyrone D.

    2008-01-01

    Deficits in learning and memory are among the most robust correlates of schizophrenia. It has been hypothesized that these deficits are in part due to reduced conscious recollection and increased reliance on familiarity assessment as a basis for retrieval. The Remember-Know (R-K) paradigm was administered to 35 patients with chronic schizophrenia and 35 healthy controls. In addition to making “remember” and “know” judgments, the participants were asked to make forced choice recognition judgments with regard to details about the learning episode. Analyses comparing response types showed a significant reduction in “remember” responses and a significant increase in “know” responses in schizophrenia patients relative to controls. Both patients and controls recalled more details of the learning episode for “remember” compared to “know” responses, although, in particular for “remember” responses, patients recalled fewer details compared with controls. Notably, patients recognized fewer inter-item but not intra-item stimulus features compared with controls. These findings suggest deficits in organizing and integrating relational information during the learning episode and/or using relational information for retrieval. A Dual-Process Signal Detection interpretation of these findings suggests that recollection in chronic schizophrenia is significantly reduced, while familiarity is not. Additionally, a unidimensional Signal Detection Theory interpretation suggests that chronic schizophrenia patients show a reduction in memory strength, and an altered criterion on the memory strength distribution for detecting new compared with old stimuli but not for detecting stimuli that are remembered versus familiar. Taken together, these findings are consistent with a deficit in recollection and increased reliance on familiarity in making recognition memory judgments in chronic schizophrenia. PMID:17964760

  15. Spatial and Temporal Flood Risk Assessment for Decision Making Approach

    Science.gov (United States)

    Azizat, Nazirah; Omar, Wan-Mohd-Sabki Wan

    2018-03-01

    Heavy rainfall, adversely impacting inundation areas, depends on the magnitude of the flood. Significantly, location of settlements, infrastructure and facilities in floodplains result in many regions facing flooding risks. A problem faced by the decision maker in an assessment of flood vulnerability and evaluation of adaptation measures is recurrent flooding in the same areas. Identification of recurrent flooding areas and frequency of floods should be priorities for flood risk management. However, spatial and temporal variability become major factors of uncertainty in flood risk management. Therefore, dynamic and spatial characteristics of these changes in flood impact assessment are important in making decisions about the future of infrastructure development and community life. System dynamics (SD) simulation and hydrodynamic modelling are presented as tools for modelling the dynamic characteristics of flood risk and spatial variability. This paper discusses the integration between spatial and temporal information that is required by the decision maker for the identification of multi-criteria decision problems involving multiple stakeholders.

  16. A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: Mapping Bounded Rationality

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kahneman, Daniel

    2003-01-01

    Early studies of intuitive judgment and decision making conducted with the late Amos Tversky are reviewed in the context of two related concepts: an analysis of accessibility, the ease with which thoughts come to mind; a distinction between effortless intuition and deliberate reasoning. Intuitive thoughts, like percepts, are highly accessible.…

  17. Audiovisual Temporal Processing and Synchrony Perception in the Rat.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schormans, Ashley L; Scott, Kaela E; Vo, Albert M Q; Tyker, Anna; Typlt, Marei; Stolzberg, Daniel; Allman, Brian L

    2016-01-01

    Extensive research on humans has improved our understanding of how the brain integrates information from our different senses, and has begun to uncover the brain regions and large-scale neural activity that contributes to an observer's ability to perceive the relative timing of auditory and visual stimuli. In the present study, we developed the first behavioral tasks to assess the perception of audiovisual temporal synchrony in rats. Modeled after the parameters used in human studies, separate groups of rats were trained to perform: (1) a simultaneity judgment task in which they reported whether audiovisual stimuli at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were presented simultaneously or not; and (2) a temporal order judgment task in which they reported whether they perceived the auditory or visual stimulus to have been presented first. Furthermore, using in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the lateral extrastriate visual (V2L) cortex of anesthetized rats, we performed the first investigation of how neurons in the rat multisensory cortex integrate audiovisual stimuli presented at different SOAs. As predicted, rats ( n = 7) trained to perform the simultaneity judgment task could accurately (~80%) identify synchronous vs. asynchronous (200 ms SOA) trials. Moreover, the rats judged trials at 10 ms SOA to be synchronous, whereas the majority (~70%) of trials at 100 ms SOA were perceived to be asynchronous. During the temporal order judgment task, rats ( n = 7) perceived the synchronous audiovisual stimuli to be "visual first" for ~52% of the trials, and calculation of the smallest timing interval between the auditory and visual stimuli that could be detected in each rat (i.e., the just noticeable difference (JND)) ranged from 77 ms to 122 ms. Neurons in the rat V2L cortex were sensitive to the timing of audiovisual stimuli, such that spiking activity was greatest during trials when the visual stimulus preceded the auditory by 20-40 ms. Ultimately, given

  18. The effect of stimulus intensity on response time and accuracy in dynamic, temporally constrained environments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Causer, J; McRobert, A P; Williams, A M

    2013-10-01

    The ability to make accurate judgments and execute effective skilled movements under severe temporal constraints are fundamental to elite performance in a number of domains including sport, military combat, law enforcement, and medicine. In two experiments, we examine the effect of stimulus strength on response time and accuracy in a temporally constrained, real-world, decision-making task. Specifically, we examine the effect of low stimulus intensity (black) and high stimulus intensity (sequin) uniform designs, worn by teammates, to determine the effect of stimulus strength on the ability of soccer players to make rapid and accurate responses. In both field- and laboratory-based scenarios, professional soccer players viewed developing patterns of play and were required to make a penetrative pass to an attacking player. Significant differences in response accuracy between uniform designs were reported in laboratory- and field-based experiments. Response accuracy was significantly higher in the sequin compared with the black uniform condition. Response times only differed between uniform designs in the laboratory-based experiment. These findings extend the literature into a real-world environment and have significant implications for the design of clothing wear in a number of domains. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  19. Do humans (Homo sapiens) and fish (Pterophyllum scalare) make similar numerosity judgments?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Miletto Petrazzini, Maria Elena; Agrillo, Christian; Izard, Véronique; Bisazza, Angelo

    2016-11-01

    Numerous studies have shown that many animal species can be trained to discriminate between stimuli differing in numerosity. However, in the absence of generalization tests with untrained numerosities, what decision criterion was used by subjects remains unclear: the subjects may succeed by selecting a specific number of items (a criterion over absolute numerosities), or by applying a more general relative numerosity rule, for example, selecting the larger/smaller quantity of items. The latter case may require more powerful representations, supporting judgments of order ("more/less") beyond simple "same/different" judgments, but a relative numerosity rule may also be more adaptive. In previous research, we showed that guppies (Poecilia reticulata) spontaneously prefer relative numerosity rules. To date it is unclear whether this preference is shared by other fish and, more broadly, other species. Here we compared the performance of angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare) with that of human adults (Homo sapiens) in a task in which subjects were initially trained to select arrays containing 10 dots (either in 5 vs. 10 or 10 vs. 20 comparisons). Subsequently they were tested with the previously trained numerosity and a novel numerosity (respectively, 20 or 5). In the absence of explicit instructions, both species spontaneously favored a relative rule, selecting the novel numerosity. These similarities demonstrate that, beyond shared representations for numerical quantities, vertebrate species may also share a system for taking decisions about quantities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

  20. Public's perception and judgment on nuclear power

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Choi, Young Sung; Kim, Jong Seok; Lee, Byung Wook

    2000-01-01

    A public's perception and judgment model on nuclear power is developed to reveal the structure of public acceptance toward nuclear power in Korea. This is somewhat a verification of an earlier study by the author using two independent sets of survey data. A perception model makes it possible to construct two major exploratory variables, perceived risk and perceived benefit. The difference of perception is analyzed for different groups such as gender, education difference, and different information channels. A judgment model helps identify influential factors that improve the acceptance of nuclear energy. Estimates of model parameters from independent data sets were not significantly different, which implies the validity of the model. Methodologies of this study can be used as the basis for investigating the structure of public perception of technological risks and benefits, designing a public information and risk communication program, and developing remedial policy actions to improve public acceptance

  1. Instruction in Information Structuring Improves Bayesian Judgment in Intelligence Analysts

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    David R. Mandel

    2015-04-01

    Full Text Available An experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of brief instruction in information structuring (i.e., representing and integrating information for improving the coherence of probability judgments and binary choices among intelligence analysts. Forty-three analysts were presented with comparable sets of Bayesian judgment problems before and immediately after instruction. After instruction, analysts’ probability judgments were more coherent (i.e., more additive and compliant with Bayes theorem. Instruction also improved the coherence of binary choices regarding category membership: after instruction, subjects were more likely to invariably choose the category to which they assigned the higher probability of a target’s membership. The research provides a rare example of evidence-based validation of effectiveness in instruction to improve the statistical assessment skills of intelligence analysts. Such instruction could also be used to improve the assessment quality of other types of experts who are required to integrate statistical information or make probabilistic assessments.

  2. Use of fuzzy set theory in the aggregation of expert judgments

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Moon, Joo Hyun; Kang, Chang Sun

    1999-01-01

    It is sometimes impossible to make a correct decision in a certain engineering task without the help from professional expert judgments. Even though there are different expert opinions available, however, they should be appropriately aggregated to a useful form for making an acceptable engineering decision. This paper proposes a technique which utilizes the fuzzy set theory in the aggregation of expert judgments. In the technique, two main key concepts are employed: linguistic variables and fuzzy numbers. Linguistic variables first represent the relative importance of evaluation criteria under consideration and the degree of confidence on each expert perceived by the decision maker, and then are replaced by suitable triangular fuzzy numbers for arithmetic manipulation. As a benchmark problem, the pressure increment in the containment of Sequoyah nuclear power plant due to reactor vessel breach was estimated to verify and validate the proposed technique

  3. How FDG-PET helps making decision for surgery in various difficult subgroups of temporal lobe epilepsy?

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Tepmongkol, S [Division of Nuclear Medicine, Department of Radiology and Division of Neurology, Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok (Thailand); Locharernkul, C [Division of Neurology, Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University and Chulalongkorn Comprehensive Epilepsy Program under the patronage of Professor Doctor HRH Princess Chulabhorn, Bangkok (Thailand); Chaiwatanarat, T; Kingpetch, K; Sirisalipoch, S [Division of Nuclear Medicine, Department of Radiology, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok (Thailand); Limotai, C; Loplumlert, J [Chulalongkorn Comprehensive Epilepsy Program under the patronage of Professor Doctor HRH Princess Chulabhorn, Bangkok (Thailand)

    2007-07-01

    Concordant pre-surgical data are the important predictors of good surgical outcome in patients with localization-related epilepsy. Medically intractable temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis (HS) and concordant pre-surgical data is straightforward and may not need functional imaging. However, in other instances for example, HS with discordant data (HSD), bilateral HS with discordant data (BHSD), temporal lobe epilepsy with dual pathology (DP), non-lesional temporal lobe epilepsy (NL) are the difficult subgroups. In these groups, functional imaging eg. brain perfusion SPECT or brain PET may play a major role for surgical decision making. To our knowledge, there was no previous data in using FDG-PET in different subgroups as mentioned. Only some previous studies in single subgroup without analyzing impact of PET findings on decision-making have been reported. We thus aim to evaluate the usefulness of FDG-PET in these 4 subgroups.

  4. Towards a Kantian Theory of Judgment : the power of judgment in its practical and aesthetic employment

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    During, D.K.; Duwell, M.

    2015-01-01

    Human beings orient themselves in the world via judgments; factual, moral, prudential, aesthetic, and all kinds of mixed judgments. Particularly for normative orientation in complex and contested contexts of action, it can be challenging to form judgments. This paper explores what one can reasonably

  5. Assessing Veterinary and Animal Science Students' Moral Judgment Development on Animal Ethics Issues.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Verrinder, Joy M; Phillips, Clive J C

    2015-01-01

    Little has been done to assess veterinarians' moral judgment in relation to animal ethics issues. Following development of the VetDIT, a new moral judgment measure for animal ethics issues, this study aimed to refine and further validate the VetDIT, and to identify effects of teaching interventions on moral judgment and changes in moral judgment over time. VetDIT-V1 was refined into VetDIT-V2, and V3 was developed as a post-intervention test to prevent repetition. To test these versions for comparability, veterinary and animal science students (n=271) were randomly assigned to complete different versions. The VetDIT discriminates between stages of moral judgment, condensed into three schemas: Personal Interest (PI), Maintaining Norms (MN), and Universal Principles (UP). There were no differences in the scores for MN and UP between the versions, and we equated PI scores to account for differences between versions. Veterinary science students (n=130) who completed a three-hour small-group workshop on moral development theory and ethical decision making increased their use of UP in moral reasoning, whereas students (n=271) who received similar information in a 50-minute lecture did not. A longitudinal comparison of matched first- and third-year students (n=39) revealed no moral judgment development toward greater use of UP. The VetDIT is therefore useful for assessing moral judgment of animal and human ethics issues in veterinary and other animal-related professions. Intensive small-group workshops using moral development knowledge and skills, rather than lectures, are conducive to developing veterinary students' moral judgment.

  6. Temporal and spectral interaction in loudness perception

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pedersen, Benjamin; Ellermeier, Wolfgang

    2005-04-01

    An experiment was conducted to investigate how changes in spectral content influence loudness judgments. Six listeners were asked to discriminate sounds, which were of one second duration and changing in level every 0.1 s. In one condition the first half of the sound was low-pass filtered and the second half high-pass filtered. In a second condition the opposite order was used. In a third condition no filtering was applied and the frequency spectrum was simply white noise. The results were analyzed using a statistical method, which assigns relative weights to the ten temporal segments. In this way individual weighting curves were obtained for each condition. Listeners tended to emphasize the beginning of the sound in their loudness judgments. When the frequency spectrum changed in the middle of the sound, however, the weighting of the onset of the new spectral content was emphasized as well. This outcome is inconsistent with overall temporal integration, and argues for a cognitive mechanism allocating attention to changes in an event sequence.

  7. Temporal lobe structures and facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia patients and nonpsychotic relatives.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Goghari, Vina M; Macdonald, Angus W; Sponheim, Scott R

    2011-11-01

    Temporal lobe abnormalities and emotion recognition deficits are prominent features of schizophrenia and appear related to the diathesis of the disorder. This study investigated whether temporal lobe structural abnormalities were associated with facial emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia and related to genetic liability for the disorder. Twenty-seven schizophrenia patients, 23 biological family members, and 36 controls participated. Several temporal lobe regions (fusiform, superior temporal, middle temporal, amygdala, and hippocampus) previously associated with face recognition in normative samples and found to be abnormal in schizophrenia were evaluated using volumetric analyses. Participants completed a facial emotion recognition task and an age recognition control task under time-limited and self-paced conditions. Temporal lobe volumes were tested for associations with task performance. Group status explained 23% of the variance in temporal lobe volume. Left fusiform gray matter volume was decreased by 11% in patients and 7% in relatives compared with controls. Schizophrenia patients additionally exhibited smaller hippocampal and middle temporal volumes. Patients were unable to improve facial emotion recognition performance with unlimited time to make a judgment but were able to improve age recognition performance. Patients additionally showed a relationship between reduced temporal lobe gray matter and poor facial emotion recognition. For the middle temporal lobe region, the relationship between greater volume and better task performance was specific to facial emotion recognition and not age recognition. Because schizophrenia patients exhibited a specific deficit in emotion recognition not attributable to a generalized impairment in face perception, impaired emotion recognition may serve as a target for interventions.

  8. Priming makes a stimulus more salient

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Theeuwes, J.; van der Burg, E.

    2013-01-01

    The present study used visual prior entry to determine which of two stimuli received attention first. Observers were asked to judge whether two test stimuli across a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were synchronized or not (simultaneity judgment task; SJ), or to report the temporal order

  9. The Hague Judgments Convention

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Nielsen, Peter Arnt

    2011-01-01

    The Hague Judgments Convention of 2005 is the first global convention on international jurisdiction and recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters. The author explains the political and legal background of the Convention, its content and certain crucial issues during...

  10. Calibrating Legal Judgments

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Frederick Schauer

    2017-09-01

    Full Text Available Objective to study the notion and essence of legal judgments calibration the possibilities of using it in the lawenforcement activity to explore the expenses and advantages of using it. Methods dialectic approach to the cognition of social phenomena which enables to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the integrity of objective and subjective factors it determined the choice of the following research methods formallegal comparative legal sociological methods of cognitive psychology and philosophy. Results In ordinary life people who assess other peoplersaquos judgments typically take into account the other judgments of those they are assessing in order to calibrate the judgment presently being assessed. The restaurant and hotel rating website TripAdvisor is exemplary because it facilitates calibration by providing access to a raterrsaquos previous ratings. Such information allows a user to see whether a particular rating comes from a rater who is enthusiastic about every place she patronizes or instead from someone who is incessantly hard to please. And even when less systematized as in assessing a letter of recommendation or college transcript calibration by recourse to the decisional history of those whose judgments are being assessed is ubiquitous. Yet despite the ubiquity and utility of such calibration the legal system seems perversely to reject it. Appellate courts do not openly adjust their standard of review based on the previous judgments of the judge whose decision they are reviewing nor do judges in reviewing legislative or administrative decisions magistrates in evaluating search warrant representations or jurors in assessing witness perception. In most legal domains calibration by reference to the prior decisions of the reviewee is invisible either because it does not exist or because reviewing bodies are unwilling to admit using what they in fact know and employ. Scientific novelty for the first

  11. Psychopathy: what apology making tells us about moral agency.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ayob, Gloria; Thornton, Tim

    2014-02-01

    Psychopathy is often used to settle disputes about the nature of moral judgment. The "trolley problem" is a familiar scenario in which psychopathy is used as a test case. Where a convergence in response to the trolley problem is registered between psychopathic subjects and non-psychopathic (normal) subjects, it is assumed that this convergence indicates that the capacity for making moral judgments is unimpaired in psychopathy. This, in turn, is taken to have implications for the dispute between motivation internalists and motivation externalists, for instance. In what follows, we want to do two things: firstly, we set out to question the assumption that convergence is informative of the capacity for moral judgment in psychopathy. Next, we consider a distinct feature of psychopathy which we think provides strong grounds for holding that the capacity for moral judgment is seriously impaired in psychopathic subjects. The feature in question is the psychopathic subject's inability to make sincere apologies. Our central claim will be this: convergence in response to trolley problems does not tell us very much about the psychopathic subject's capacity to make moral judgments, but his inability to make sincere apologies does provide us with strong grounds for holding that this capacity is seriously impaired in psychopathy.

  12. An Experimental Test of How Selfies Change Social Judgments on Facebook.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Taylor, Samuel Hardman; Hinck, Alexandra S; Lim, Hajin

    2017-10-01

    Selfies are everywhere on social media. Research has focused only on who is posting selfies and has not addressed the audience members viewing selfies. This study aims to fill this gap by analyzing the judgments people make of selfies posted on Facebook. Using an online experiment, we test how including a selfie on a Facebook status update changes people's appraisals of narcissism, message appropriateness, and social attraction. We also consider how the valence and intimacy of the status update text interplay with the selfie to change social judgments. Participants rated posts with selfies as more narcissistic and inappropriate, and less socially attractive. Selfie evaluations also depended upon the valence and intimacy of the status update text. Gender of the selfie poster did not influence evaluation of posts. One implication from these results is that posting selfies on social media may lead to negative judgments about the poster.

  13. Moral judgment of alcohol addicts

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mladenović Ivica

    2010-01-01

    Full Text Available Introduction. Alcoholism could represent an important factor of crime and different forms of abuse of family members (physical and emotional exist in many alcohol-addict cases, as well as characteristics of immoral behaviour. Objective. The objective of our study was to determine the predominating forms in moral judgment of alcohol addicts, and to examine whether there was any statistically significant difference in moral judgment between alcohol addicted persons and non-alcoholics from general population. Methods. The sample consisted of 62 subjects, divided into a study (alcoholics and a control group (non-alcoholics from general population. The following instruments were used: social-demographic data, AUDIT, MMPI-201, cybernetic battery of IQ tests (KOG-3 and the TMR moral reasoning test. Results. Mature forms of moral judgment prevailed in both group of subjects, alcohol addicted persons and non-alcoholics. Regarding mature forms of moral judgment (driven by emotions and cognitive non-alcoholics from the general population had higher scores, but the difference was not statistically significant. Regarding socially adapted and egocentric orientation alcohol addicted persons had higher scores. However, only regarding intuitive-irrational orientation there was a statistically significant difference in the level of moral judgment (p<0.05 between alcoholics and non-alcoholics, in favour of the alcoholics. Conclusion. Moral judgment is not a category differing alcohol addicted persons from those who are not. Nevertheless, the potential destructivity of alcoholism is reflected in lower scores regarding mature orientations in moral judgment.

  14. Can I trust you? Negative affective priming influences social judgments in schizophrenia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hooker, Christine I.; Tully, Laura M.; Verosky, Sara C.; Fisher, Melissa; Holland, Christine; Vinogradov, Sophia

    2010-01-01

    Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate judgments based on social cues as well as the ability to control the influence of internal or external affective information on those judgments. Prior research suggests that individuals with schizophrenia misinterpret social stimuli and this misinterpretation contributes to impaired social functioning. We tested the hypothesis that for people with schizophrenia social judgments are abnormally influenced by affective information. 23 schizophrenia and 35 healthy control participants rated the trustworthiness of faces following the presentation of neutral, negative (threat-related), or positive affective primes. Results showed that all participants rated faces as less trustworthy following negative affective primes compared to faces that followed neutral or positive primes. Importantly, this effect was significantly more pronounced for schizophrenia participants, suggesting that schizophrenia may be characterised by an exaggerated influence of negative affective information on social judgment. Furthermore, the extent that the negative affective prime influenced trustworthiness judgments was significantly associated with patients’ severity of positive symptoms, particularly feelings of persecution. These findings suggest that for people with schizophrenia negative affective information contributes to an interpretive bias, consistent with paranoid ideation, when judging the trustworthiness of others. This bias may contribute to social impairments in schizophrenia. PMID:20919787

  15. Context Effects in Valuation, Judgment and Choice: A Neuroscientific Approach

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    K. Hytönen (Kaisa)

    2011-01-01

    textabstractIt is well known that our choices and judgments depend on the context. For instance, prior experiences can influence subsequent decisions. People tend to make riskier decisions if they have a chance to win back a previous loss or if they can gamble with previously won money. Another

  16. Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tversky, Amos; Kahneman, Daniel

    1983-01-01

    Judgments under uncertainty are often mediated by intuitive heuristics that are not bound by the conjunction rule of probability. Representativeness and availability heuristics can make a conjunction appear more probable than one of its constituents. Alternative interpretations of this conjunction fallacy are discussed and attempts to combat it…

  17. 5 CFR 919.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... 5 Administrative Personnel 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Civil judgment. 919.920 Section 919.920 Administrative Personnel OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT (CONTINUED) CIVIL SERVICE REGULATIONS (CONTINUED) GOVERNMENTWIDE DEBARMENT AND SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 919.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment...

  18. Neural evidence for moral intuition and the temporal dynamics of interactions between emotional processes and moral cognition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gui, Dan-Yang; Gan, Tian; Liu, Chao

    2016-01-01

    Behavioral and neurological studies have revealed that emotions influence moral cognition. Although moral stimuli are emotionally charged, the time course of interactions between emotions and moral judgments remains unknown. In the present study, we investigated the temporal dynamics of the interaction between emotional processes and moral cognition. The results revealed that when making moral judgments, the time course of the event-related potential (ERP) waveform was significantly different between high emotional arousal and low emotional arousal contexts. Different stages of processing were distinguished, showing distinctive interactions between emotional processes and moral reasoning. The precise time course of moral intuition and moral reasoning sheds new light on theoretical models of moral psychology. Specifically, the N1 component (interpreted as representing moral intuition) did not appear to be influenced by emotional arousal. However, the N2 component and late positive potential were strongly affected by emotional arousal; the slow wave was influenced by both emotional arousal and morality, suggesting distinct moral processing at different emotional arousal levels.

  19. Associative Processes in Intuitive Judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Morewedge, Carey K.; Kahneman, Daniel

    2014-01-01

    Dual-system models of reasoning attribute errors of judgment to two failures. The automatic operations of a “System 1” generate a faulty intuition, which the controlled operations of a “System 2” fail to detect and correct. We identify System 1 with the automatic operations of associative memory and draw on research in the priming paradigm to describe how it operates. We explain how three features of associative memory—associative coherence, attribute substitution, and processing fluency—give rise to major biases of intuitive judgment. Our article highlights both the ability of System 1 to create complex and skilled judgments and the role of the system as a source of judgment errors. PMID:20696611

  20. 7 CFR 3017.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... 7 Agriculture 15 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Civil judgment. 3017.920 Section 3017.920 Agriculture... AGRICULTURE GOVERNMENTWIDE DEBARMENT AND SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 3017.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction, whether...

  1. 29 CFR 1471.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... 29 Labor 4 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Civil judgment. 1471.920 Section 1471.920 Labor Regulations... SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 1471.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction, whether by verdict, decision, settlement...

  2. 31 CFR 19.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Civil judgment. 19.920 Section 19.920... SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 19.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction, whether by verdict, decision, settlement...

  3. Age-related schema reliance of judgments of learning in predicting source memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shi, Liang-Zi; Tang, Wei-Hai; Liu, Xi-Ping

    2012-01-01

    Source memory refers to mental processes of encoding and making attributions to the origin of information. We investigated schematic effects on source attributions of younger and older adults for different schema-based types of items, and their schema-utilization of judgments of learning (JOLs) in estimating source memory. Participants studied statements presented by two speakers either as a doctor or a lawyer: those in the schema-after-encoding condition were informed their occupation only before retrieving, while those of schema-before-encoding were presented the schematic information prior to study. Immediately after learning every item, they made judgments of the likelihood for it to be correctly attributed to the original source later. In the test, they fulfilled a task of source attributing. The results showed a two-edged effect of schemas: schema reliance improved source memory for schema-consistent items while impaired that for schema-inconsistent items, even with schematic information presented prior to encoding. Compared with younger adults, older adults benefited more from schema-based compensatory mechanisms. Both younger and older adults could make JOLs based on before-encoding schematic information, and the schema-based JOLs were more accurate in predicting source memory than JOLs made without schema support. However, even in the schema-after-encoding condition, older adults were able to make metacognitive judgments as accurately as younger adults did, though they did have great impairments in source memory itself.

  4. Development of a moral judgment measure for veterinary education.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Verrinder, Joy M; Phillips, Clive J C

    2014-01-01

    Veterinarians increasingly face animal ethics issues, conflicts, and dilemmas, both in practice and in policy, such as the tension between clients' and animals' interests. Little has been done to measure the capacity of veterinarians to make ethical judgments to prevent and address these issues or to identify the effectiveness of strategies to build this capacity. The objectives of this study were, first, to develop a test to identify the capacity of veterinarians to make ethical decisions in relation to animal ethics issues and, second, to assess students' perceptions of the usefulness of three methods for the development of ethical decision making. The Veterinary Defining Issues Test (VetDIT) was piloted with 88 first-year veterinary students at an Australian university. The veterinary students were at a variety of reasoning stages in their use of the Personal Interest (PI), Maintaining Norms (MN), and Universal Principles (UP) reasoning methods in relation to both human ethics and animal ethics issues and operated at a higher level of reasoning for animal than human ethics. Thirty-eight students assessed three methods for developing ethical decision-making skills and identified these as being helpful in clarifying their positions, clarifying others' positions, increasing awareness of the complexity of making ethical decisions, using ethical frameworks and principles, and improving moral reasoning skills, with two methods identified as most helpful. These methods and the VetDIT have the potential to be used as tools for development and assessment of moral judgment in veterinary education to address animal ethics issues.

  5. The reluctance to burden others as a value in end-of-life decision making: a source of inaccuracy in substituted judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Winter, Laraine; Parks, Susan M

    2012-03-01

    Most patients are decisionally incapacitated at the end of life, leaving final treatment decisions to proxies, whose substituted judgment is often inaccurate. We investigated the reluctance to burden others (RBO), a commonly cited patient value, as a possible source of proxy inaccuracy. In a sample of 202 elders and their proxies, elders responded to three burden-related questions and the Life-prolonging Treatment Preferences Questionnaire. Proxies used substituted judgment to respond to the same questions. Although RBO predicted treatment preferences for both elders and proxies, elders rated RBO significantly more important than did proxies. In addition, larger elder-proxy differences in RBO were associated with more inaccurate substituted judgment.

  6. The development of intention-based sociomoral judgment and distribution behavior from a third-party stance.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Jing; Tomasello, Michael

    2018-03-01

    The current study investigated children's intention-based sociomoral judgments and distribution behavior from a third-party stance. An actor puppet showed either positive or negative intention toward a target puppet, which had previously performed a prosocial or antisocial action toward others (i.e., children witnessed various types of indirect reciprocity). Children (3- and 5-year-olds) were asked to make sociomoral judgments and to distribute resources to the actor puppet. Results showed that 5-year-olds were more likely than 3-year-olds to be influenced by intention when they made their judgment and distributed resources. The target's previous actions affected only 5-year-olds' intent-based social preference. These results suggest that children's judgments about intent-based indirect reciprocity develop from ages 3 to 5 years. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  7. Factors Influencing Mini-CEX Rater Judgments and Their Practical Implications: A Systematic Literature Review.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lee, Victor; Brain, Keira; Martin, Jenepher

    2017-06-01

    At present, little is known about how mini-clinical evaluation exercise (mini-CEX) raters translate their observations into judgments and ratings. The authors of this systematic literature review aim both to identify the factors influencing mini-CEX rater judgments in the medical education setting and to translate these findings into practical implications for clinician assessors. The authors searched for internal and external factors influencing mini-CEX rater judgments in the medical education setting from 1980 to 2015 using the Ovid MEDLINE, PsycINFO, ERIC, PubMed, and Scopus databases. They extracted the following information from each study: country of origin, educational level, study design and setting, type of observation, occurrence of rater training, provision of feedback to the trainee, research question, and identified factors influencing rater judgments. The authors also conducted a quality assessment for each study. Seventeen articles met the inclusion criteria. The authors identified both internal and external factors that influence mini-CEX rater judgments. They subcategorized the internal factors into intrinsic rater factors, judgment-making factors (conceptualization, interpretation, attention, and impressions), and scoring factors (scoring integration and domain differentiation). The current theories of rater-based judgment have not helped clinicians resolve the issues of rater idiosyncrasy, bias, gestalt, and conflicting contextual factors; therefore, the authors believe the most important solution is to increase the justification of rater judgments through the use of specific narrative and contextual comments, which are more informative for trainees. Finally, more real-world research is required to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of rater cognition.

  8. 29 CFR 98.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... 29 Labor 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 true Civil judgment. 98.920 Section 98.920 Labor Office of the Secretary of Labor GOVERNMENTWIDE DEBARMENT AND SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 98.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction...

  9. Moral judgment and its relation to second-order theory of mind.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fu, Genyue; Xiao, Wen S; Killen, Melanie; Lee, Kang

    2014-08-01

    Recent research indicates that moral judgment and 1st-order theory of mind abilities are related. What is not known, however, is how 2nd-order theory of mind is related to moral judgment. In the present study, we extended previous findings by administering a morally relevant theory of mind task (an accidental transgressor) to 4- to 7-year-old Chinese children (N = 79) and analyzing connections with 2nd-order theory of mind understanding. Using hierarchical multiple regression analyses, we found that above and beyond age, children's 1st-order theory of mind and 2nd-order theory of mind each significantly and uniquely contributed to children's moral evaluations of the intention in the accidental transgression. These findings highlight the important roles that 1st- and 2nd-order theory of mind play in leading children to make appropriate moral judgments based on an actor's intention in a social situation. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

  10. Effect of emotional arousal on inter-temporal decision-making: an fMRI study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sohn, Jin-Hun; Kim, Hyo-Eun; Sohn, Sunju; Seok, Ji-Woo; Choi, Damee; Watanuki, Shigeki

    2015-03-07

    Previous research has shown that emotion can significantly impact decision-making in humans. The current study examined whether or not and how situationally induced emotion influences people to make inter-temporal choices. Affective pictures were used as experiment stimuli to provoke emotion, immediately followed by subjects' performance of a delay-discounting task to measure impulsivity during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Results demonstrate a subsequent process of increased impulsive decision-making following a prior exposure to both high positive and negative arousal stimuli, compared to the experiment subjects' experiences with neutral stimuli. Findings indicate that increased impulsive decision-making behaviors can occur with high arousal and can be characterized by decreased activities in the cognitive control regions such as prefronto-parietal regions. These results suggest that 'stabilization of high emotional arousal' may facilitate a reduction of impulsive decision-making and implementation of longer term goals.

  11. Achievement goals affect metacognitive judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ikeda, Kenji; Yue, Carole L.; Murayama, Kou; Castel, Alan D.

    2017-01-01

    The present study examined the effect of achievement goals on metacognitive judgments, such as judgments of learning (JOLs) and metacomprehension judgments, and actual recall performance. We conducted five experiments manipulating the instruction of achievement goals. In each experiment, participants were instructed to adopt mastery-approach goals (i.e., develop their own mental ability through a memory task) or performance-approach goals (i.e., demonstrate their strong memory ability through getting a high score on a memory task). The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that JOLs of word pairs in the performance-approach goal condition tended to be higher than those in the mastery-approach goal condition. In contrast, cued recall performance did not differ between the two goal conditions. Experiment 3 also demonstrated that metacomprehension judgments of text passages were higher in the performance-approach goal condition than in the mastery-approach goals condition, whereas test performance did not differ between conditions. These findings suggest that achievement motivation affects metacognitive judgments during learning, even when achievement motivation does not influence actual performance. PMID:28983496

  12. On Standard and Taste. Wittgenstein and Aesthetic Judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jean-Pierre Cometti

    2013-05-01

    Full Text Available The question of aesthetic judgment is related to a lot of paradoxes that have marked sustainably the reflection on arts, and even arts as such during their modern history. These paradoxes have found a first formulation, apparently clear, in the very famous Hume's essay: "On the standard of taste", but without to lead to a real resolution. In this paper, I would like to approach the question of Hume by starting from what Wittgenstein suggested about aesthetic judgment in his Cambridge lectures. To this end, I will try to give a wittgensteinian reading of Hume's essay, in order to show that though the question of aesthetic judgment makes certainly sense, the way of considering it - like the way Kant shall consider it later - can be regarded as typical of difficulties Wittgenstein tried to overcome in his investigations on rules. By giving an alternative formulation to this question, we should be able to examine differently the problems of the aesthetic judgment, to underline more precisely the originality of Wittgenstein's approach, and perhaps to better grasp what are its consequences, not only for a better comprehension of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and art, but for the type of perplexity to which we must face everytime we meet the paradox inherent to the question of aesthetic appreciation as such: how can we conceive the very idea of a standard involving a normative meaning without making to faint what gives to a work of art its value. We shall see that Wittgenstein’s suggestions, though their contribution to a better understanding of this question is still affected by some ambiguities, are to be reconsidered under the light of his anti-essentialism, and that these ambiguities can be dissipated by dissociating, on one hand, what belongs to his own tastes or to his related thoughts and on the other hand what we can conceive through the ways which were opened by his philosophy beyond his personal inclinations. Despite

  13. 22 CFR 208.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 22 Foreign Relations 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Civil judgment. 208.920 Section 208.920 Foreign...) Definitions § 208.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

  14. 34 CFR 85.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... 34 Education 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Civil judgment. 85.920 Section 85.920 Education Office...) Definitions § 85.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

  15. 2 CFR 180.915 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... 2 Grants and Agreements 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Civil judgment. 180.915 Section 180.915... § 180.915 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

  16. 22 CFR 1006.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 22 Foreign Relations 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 true Civil judgment. 1006.920 Section 1006.920...) Definitions § 1006.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

  17. 22 CFR 1508.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 22 Foreign Relations 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 true Civil judgment. 1508.920 Section 1508.920...) Definitions § 1508.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

  18. Normative Judgments and Individual Essence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    De Freitas, Julian; Tobia, Kevin P; Newman, George E; Knobe, Joshua

    2017-04-01

    A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time-that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types of features that people typically consider when making such judgments, to date, existing work has not explored how these judgments may be shaped by normative considerations. The present studies demonstrate that normative beliefs do appear to play an important role in people's beliefs about persistence. Specifically, people are more likely to judge that the identity of a given entity (e.g., a hypothetical nation) remains the same when its features improve (e.g., the nation becomes more egalitarian) than when its features deteriorate (e.g., the nation becomes more discriminatory). Study 1 provides a basic demonstration of this effect. Study 2 shows that this effect is moderated by individual differences in normative beliefs. Study 3 examines the underlying mechanism, which is the belief that, in general, various entities are essentially good. Study 4 directly manipulates beliefs about essence to show that the positivity bias regarding essences is causally responsible for the effect. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  19. Factors Influencing Nursing Students' Clinical Judgment: A Qualitative Directed Content Analysis in an Iranian Context.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pouralizadeh, Moluk; Khankeh, Hamidreza; Ebadi, Abbas; Dalvandi, Asghar

    2017-05-01

    Clinical judgment is necessary for clinical decision making and enhancing it in nursing students improves health care quality. Since clinical judgment is an interactive phenomenon and dependent on context and culture, it can be affected by many different factors. To understand the experiences of Iranian nursing students and teachers about the factors influencing nursing students' clinical judgment. A qualitative study was conducted using a directed content analysis approach. In this study, purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews were applied with seven nursing students, six faculty member teachers and four clinical instructors from Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Gilan, Iran. The factors influencing nursing students' clinical judgment consisted of five main categories including thoughtful behaviour, professional ethics, use of evidence based care, the context of learning environment and individual and professional features of clinical teachers. Relying on the results of this research, teachers can create an appropriate educational condition and a safe psychological atmosphere, use instructional strategies strengthening deep thought processes, applying professional ethics and scientific evidence and principles to establish clinical judgment in nursing students.

  20. Nonrational processes in ethical decision making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rogerson, Mark D; Gottlieb, Michael C; Handelsman, Mitchell M; Knapp, Samuel; Younggren, Jeffrey

    2011-10-01

    Most current ethical decision-making models provide a logical and reasoned process for making ethical judgments, but these models are empirically unproven and rely upon assumptions of rational, conscious, and quasilegal reasoning. Such models predominate despite the fact that many nonrational factors influence ethical thought and behavior, including context, perceptions, relationships, emotions, and heuristics. For example, a large body of behavioral research has demonstrated the importance of automatic intuitive and affective processes in decision making and judgment. These processes profoundly affect human behavior and lead to systematic biases and departures from normative theories of rationality. Their influence represents an important but largely unrecognized component of ethical decision making. We selectively review this work; provide various illustrations; and make recommendations for scientists, trainers, and practitioners to aid them in integrating the understanding of nonrational processes with ethical decision making.

  1. 21 CFR 1404.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 21 Food and Drugs 9 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Civil judgment. 1404.920 Section 1404.920 Food and...) Definitions § 1404.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

  2. Effects of Suboptimally Presented Erotic Pictures on Moral Judgments: A Cross-Cultural Comparison.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Antonio Olivera-La Rosa

    Full Text Available Previous research has identified a set of core factors that influence moral judgments. The present study addresses the interplay between moral judgments and four factors: (a incidental affects, (b sociocultural context, (c type of dilemma, and (d participant's sex. We asked participants in two different countries (Colombia and Spain to judge the acceptability of actions in response to personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Before each dilemma an affective prime (erotic, pleasant or neutral pictures was presented suboptimally. Our results show that: a relative to neutral priming, erotic primes increase the acceptance of harm for a greater good (i.e., more utilitarian judgments, b relative to Colombians, Spanish participants rated causing harm as less acceptable, c relative to impersonal dilemmas, personal dilemmas reduced the acceptance of harm, and d relative to men, women were less likely to consider harm acceptable. Our results are congruent with findings showing that sex is a crucial factor in moral cognition, and they extend previous research by showing the interaction between culture and incidental factors in the making of moral judgments.

  3. Effects of Suboptimally Presented Erotic Pictures on Moral Judgments: A Cross-Cultural Comparison.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Olivera-La Rosa, Antonio; Corradi, Guido; Villacampa, Javier; Martí-Vilar, Manuel; Arango, Olber Eduardo; Rosselló, Jaume

    2016-01-01

    Previous research has identified a set of core factors that influence moral judgments. The present study addresses the interplay between moral judgments and four factors: (a) incidental affects, (b) sociocultural context, (c) type of dilemma, and (d) participant's sex. We asked participants in two different countries (Colombia and Spain) to judge the acceptability of actions in response to personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Before each dilemma an affective prime (erotic, pleasant or neutral pictures) was presented suboptimally. Our results show that: a) relative to neutral priming, erotic primes increase the acceptance of harm for a greater good (i.e., more utilitarian judgments), b) relative to Colombians, Spanish participants rated causing harm as less acceptable, c) relative to impersonal dilemmas, personal dilemmas reduced the acceptance of harm, and d) relative to men, women were less likely to consider harm acceptable. Our results are congruent with findings showing that sex is a crucial factor in moral cognition, and they extend previous research by showing the interaction between culture and incidental factors in the making of moral judgments.

  4. Expert judgment in assessing radwaste risks: What Nevadans should know about Yucca Mountain

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Shrader-Frechette, K.

    1992-06-01

    For phenomena characterized by accurate and largely complete data, quantitative risk assessment (QRA) provides extraordinarily valuable and objective information. However, with phenomena for which the data, models, or probabilities are incomplete or uncertain, QRA may be less useful and more questionable, because its conclusions are typically empirically and theoretically underdetermined. In the face of empirical or theoretical underdetermination, scientists often are forced to make a number of methodological value judgments and inferences about how to estimate and evaluate the associated risks. The purpose of this project is to evaluate instances of methodological value judgments and invalid or imprecise inferences that have occurred in the QRA done for the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste facility. We shall show (1) that questionable methodological value judgments and inferences have occurred in some Yucca Mountain QRA'S; (2) that questionable judgments and inferences, similar to those in the Yucca Mountain studies, have occurred in previous QRA's done for other radiation-related facilities and have likely caused earlier QRA's to err in specific ways; and (3) that, because the value judgments and problems associated with some Yucca Mountain QRA's include repetitions of similar difficulties in earlier studies, therefore the QRA conclusions of some Yucca Mountain analyses are, at best, uncertain

  5. Individual moral judgment and cultural ideologies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Narvaez, D; Getz, I; Rest, J R; Thoma, S J

    1999-03-01

    Moral judgment cannot be reduced to cultural ideology, or vice versa. But when each construct is measured separately, then combined, the product predicts powerfully to moral thinking. In Study 1, 2 churches (N = 96) were selected for their differences on religious ideology, political identity, and moral judgment. By combining these 3 variables, a multiple correlation of .79 predicted to members' moral thinking (opinions on human rights issues). Study 2 replicated this finding in a secular sample, with the formula established in Study 1 (R = .77). Individual conceptual development in moral judgment and socialization into cultural ideology co-occur, simultaneously and reciprocally, in parallel, and not serially. Individual development in moral judgment provides the epistemological categories for cultural ideology, which in turn influences the course of moral judgment, to produce moral thinking (e.g., opinions about abortion, free speech).

  6. A Temporal Mining Framework for Classifying Un-Evenly Spaced Clinical Data: An Approach for Building Effective Clinical Decision-Making System.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jane, Nancy Yesudhas; Nehemiah, Khanna Harichandran; Arputharaj, Kannan

    2016-01-01

    Clinical time-series data acquired from electronic health records (EHR) are liable to temporal complexities such as irregular observations, missing values and time constrained attributes that make the knowledge discovery process challenging. This paper presents a temporal rough set induced neuro-fuzzy (TRiNF) mining framework that handles these complexities and builds an effective clinical decision-making system. TRiNF provides two functionalities namely temporal data acquisition (TDA) and temporal classification. In TDA, a time-series forecasting model is constructed by adopting an improved double exponential smoothing method. The forecasting model is used in missing value imputation and temporal pattern extraction. The relevant attributes are selected using a temporal pattern based rough set approach. In temporal classification, a classification model is built with the selected attributes using a temporal pattern induced neuro-fuzzy classifier. For experimentation, this work uses two clinical time series dataset of hepatitis and thrombosis patients. The experimental result shows that with the proposed TRiNF framework, there is a significant reduction in the error rate, thereby obtaining the classification accuracy on an average of 92.59% for hepatitis and 91.69% for thrombosis dataset. The obtained classification results prove the efficiency of the proposed framework in terms of its improved classification accuracy.

  7. Cold or Calculating? Reduced Activity in the Subgenual Cingulate Cortex Reflects Decreased Emotional Aversion to Harming in Counterintuitive Utilitarian Judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wiech, Katja; Kahane, Guy; Shackel, Nicholas; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian; Tracey, Irene

    2013-01-01

    Recent research on moral decision-making has suggested that many common moral judgments are based on immediate intuitions. However, some individuals arrive at highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions about when it is permissible to harm other individuals. Such utilitarian judgments have been attributed to effortful reasoning that has…

  8. Brain activations during judgments of positive self-conscious emotion and positive basic emotion: pride and joy.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Takahashi, Hidehiko; Matsuura, Masato; Koeda, Michihiko; Yahata, Noriaki; Suhara, Tetsuya; Kato, Motoichiro; Okubo, Yoshiro

    2008-04-01

    We aimed to investigate the neural correlates associated with judgments of a positive self-conscious emotion, pride, and elucidate the difference between pride and a basic positive emotion, joy, at the neural basis level using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Study of the neural basis associated with pride might contribute to a better understanding of the pride-related behaviors observed in neuropsychiatric disorders. Sixteen healthy volunteers were studied. The participants read sentences expressing joy or pride contents during the scans. Pride conditions activated the right posterior superior temporal sulcus and left temporal pole, the regions implicated in the neural substrate of social cognition or theory of mind. However, against our prediction, we did not find brain activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region responsible for inferring others' intention or self-reflection. Joy condition produced activations in the ventral striatum and insula/operculum, the key nodes of processing of hedonic or appetitive stimuli. Our results support the idea that pride is a self-conscious emotion, requiring the ability to detect the intention of others. At the same time, judgment of pride might require less self-reflection compared with those of negative self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment.

  9. A subjective utilitarian theory of moral judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cohen, Dale J; Ahn, Minwoo

    2016-10-01

    Current theories hypothesize that moral judgments are difficult because rational and emotional decision processes compete. We present a fundamentally different theory of moral judgment: the Subjective Utilitarian Theory of moral judgment. The Subjective Utilitarian Theory posits that people try to identify and save the competing item with the greatest "personal value." Moral judgments become difficult only when the competing items have similar personal values. In Experiment 1, we estimate the personal values of 104 items. In Experiments 2-5, we show that the distributional overlaps of the estimated personal values account for over 90% of the variance in reaction times (RTs) and response choices in a moral judgment task. Our model fundamentally restructures our understanding of moral judgments from a competition between decision processes to a competition between similarly valued items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

  10. Temporal characteristics of the influence of punishment on perceptual decision making in the human brain

    OpenAIRE

    Blank, H.; Guido, B.; Heekeren, H.R.; Philiastides, M.G.

    2013-01-01

    Perceptual decision making is the process by which information from sensory systems is combined and used to influence our behavior. In addition to the sensory input, this process can be affected by other factors, such as reward and punishment for correct and incorrect responses. To investigate the temporal dynamics of how monetary punishment influences perceptual decision making in humans, we collected electroencephalography (EEG) data during a perceptual categorization task whereby the punis...

  11. Perspective distortion from interpersonal distance is an implicit visual cue for social judgments of faces.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ronnie Bryan

    Full Text Available The basis on which people make social judgments from the image of a face remains an important open problem in fields ranging from psychology to neuroscience and economics. Multiple cues from facial appearance influence the judgments that viewers make. Here we investigate the contribution of a novel cue: the change in appearance due to the perspective distortion that results from viewing distance. We found that photographs of faces taken from within personal space elicit lower investments in an economic trust game, and lower ratings of social traits (such as trustworthiness, competence, and attractiveness, compared to photographs taken from a greater distance. The effect was replicated across multiple studies that controlled for facial image size, facial expression and lighting, and was not explained by face width-to-height ratio, explicit knowledge of the camera distance, or whether the faces are perceived as typical. These results demonstrate a novel facial cue influencing a range of social judgments as a function of interpersonal distance, an effect that may be processed implicitly.

  12. Dissociations among judgments do not reflect cognitive priority: an associative explanation of memory for frequency information in contingency learning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vadillo, Miguel A; Luque, David

    2013-03-01

    Previous research on causal learning has usually made strong claims about the relative complexity and temporal priority of some processes over others based on evidence about dissociations between several types of judgments. In particular, it has been argued that the dissociation between causal judgments and trial-type frequency information is incompatible with the general cognitive architecture proposed by associative models. In contrast with this view, we conduct an associative analysis of this process showing that this need not be the case. We conclude that any attempt to gain a better insight on the cognitive architecture involved in contingency learning cannot rely solely on data about these dissociations.

  13. Interactions between the spatial and temporal stimulus factors that influence multisensory integration in human performance.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stevenson, Ryan A; Fister, Juliane Krueger; Barnett, Zachary P; Nidiffer, Aaron R; Wallace, Mark T

    2012-05-01

    In natural environments, human sensory systems work in a coordinated and integrated manner to perceive and respond to external events. Previous research has shown that the spatial and temporal relationships of sensory signals are paramount in determining how information is integrated across sensory modalities, but in ecologically plausible settings, these factors are not independent. In the current study, we provide a novel exploration of the impact on behavioral performance for systematic manipulations of the spatial location and temporal synchrony of a visual-auditory stimulus pair. Simple auditory and visual stimuli were presented across a range of spatial locations and stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), and participants performed both a spatial localization and simultaneity judgment task. Response times in localizing paired visual-auditory stimuli were slower in the periphery and at larger SOAs, but most importantly, an interaction was found between the two factors, in which the effect of SOA was greater in peripheral as opposed to central locations. Simultaneity judgments also revealed a novel interaction between space and time: individuals were more likely to judge stimuli as synchronous when occurring in the periphery at large SOAs. The results of this study provide novel insights into (a) how the speed of spatial localization of an audiovisual stimulus is affected by location and temporal coincidence and the interaction between these two factors and (b) how the location of a multisensory stimulus impacts judgments concerning the temporal relationship of the paired stimuli. These findings provide strong evidence for a complex interdependency between spatial location and temporal structure in determining the ultimate behavioral and perceptual outcome associated with a paired multisensory (i.e., visual-auditory) stimulus.

  14. Physiotherapy Student Clinical Examinations: The Influence of Subjective Judgments on Observational Assessment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Alexander, Helen A.

    1996-01-01

    A study investigated the role of subjective assessment in the evaluation of physiotherapy students in clinical programs. Clinical teachers, visiting lecturers, and students recorded perceptions of daily events and interactions in journals. Analysis suggests that assessors make subjective judgments about students that influence grades, and…

  15. The Effect of Analytic and Experiential Modes of Thought on Moral Judgment

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Kvaran, T.; Nichols, S.; Sanfey, A.G.

    2013-01-01

    According to dual-process theories, moral judgments are the result of two competing processes: a fast, automatic, affect-driven process and a slow, deliberative, reason-based process. Accordingly, these models make clear and testable predictions about the influence of each system. Although a small

  16. Unpacking a time interval lengthens its perceived temporal distance

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yang eLiu

    2014-11-01

    Full Text Available In quantity estimation, people often perceive that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The current study investigated such an unpacking effect in temporal distance judgment. Our results showed that participants in the unpacked condition judged a given time interval longer than those in the packed condition, even the time interval was kept constant between the two conditions. Furthermore, this unpacking effect persists regardless of the unpacking ways we employed. Results suggest that unpacking a time interval may be a good strategy for lengthening its perceived temporal distance.

  17. Pengaruh Gender dan Pengalaman Audit terhadap Audit Judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Erna Pasanda

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available This study aims to examine the influence of gender and audit experience toward audit judgment and to examine gender and audit experience towards audit judgment when moderated by client credibility. The research was conducted on auditors who worked on KAP in Makassar South Sulawesi using survey. Sampling technique in this study was random sampling based on judgment. Data collected and then analyzed by employing regression method and Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA. The result indicates that gender does not significantly influence audit judgment while audit experience significantly influences audit judgment. Client credibility does not moderate the influence of gender and audit experience on the audit judgment.

  18. Using Social Judgment Theory method to examine how experienced occupational therapy driver assessors use information to make fitness-to-drive recommendations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Unsworth, Carolyn; Harries, Priscilla; Davies, Miranda

    2015-02-01

    As people with a range of disabilities strive to increase their community mobility, occupational therapy driver assessors are increasingly required to make complex recommendations regarding fitness-to-drive. However, very little is known about how therapists use information to make decisions. The aim of this study was to model how experienced occupational therapy driver assessors weight and combine information when making fitness-to-drive recommendations and establish their level of decision agreement. Using Social Judgment Theory method, this study examined how 45 experienced occupational therapy driver assessors from the UK, Australia and New Zealand made fitness-to-drive recommendations for a series of 64 case scenarios. Participants completed the task on a dedicated website, and data were analysed using discriminant function analysis and an intraclass correlation coefficient. Accounting for 87% of the variance, the cues central to the fitness-to-drive recommendations made by assessors are the client's physical skills, cognitive and perceptual skills, road law craft skills, vehicle handling skills and the number of driving instructor interventions. Agreement (consensus) between fitness-to-drive recommendations was very high: intraclass correlation coefficient = .97, 95% confidence interval .96-.98). Findings can be used by both experienced and novice driver assessors to reflect on and strengthen the fitness-to-drive recommendations made to clients.

  19. Calisthenics with Words: The Effect of Readability and Investor Sophistication on Investors’ Performance Judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Xiao Carol Cui

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available Since the 1990s, the SEC has advocated for financial disclosures to be in “plain English” so that they would be more readable and informative. Past research has shown that high readability is related to more extreme investor judgments of firm performance. Processing fluency is the prevalent theory to explain this: higher readability increases the investor’s subconscious reliance on the disclosure, so positive (negative news leads to more positive (negative judgments. The relationship may not be so simple, though: drawing on research from cognitive psychology, I predict and find that investor financial literacy simultaneously influences investor decision-making, and that it has an interactive effect with readability. When presented with financial disclosure containing conflicting financial information, investors with higher financial literacy make more negative judgments than investors with low financial literacy when the disclosure is easy to read, but the effect becomes insignificant when the disclosure becomes difficult to read. This effect is moderated by a comprehension gap between the two investor groups. Financial literacy and readability interact to impact both how and how well the investor processes financial information.

  20. Logical and Decisive Combining Criterion for Binary Group Decision Making

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ivan Vrana

    2010-04-01

    Full Text Available A new combining criterion, the Multiplicative Proportional Deviative Influence (MPDI is presented for combining or aggregating multi-expert numerical judgments in Yes-or-No type ill-structured group decision making situations. This newly proposed criterion performs well in comparison with the widely used aggregation means: the Arithmetic Mean (AM, and Geometric Mean (GM, especially in better reflecting the degree of agreement between criteria levels or numerical experts’ judgments. The MPDI can be considered as another class of combining criteria that make effect of the degree of agreement among multiple numerical judgments. The MPDI is applicable in integrating several collaborative or synergistic decision making systems through combining final numerical decision outputs. A discussion and generalization of the proposed MPDI is discussed withnumerical example.

  1. Feminist Judgments as Teaching Resources

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Rosemary Hunter

    2012-10-01

    Full Text Available This paper discusses feminist judgments as a specific vehicle for teaching students to think critically about law. The analysis of appellate judgments forms a central plank of Anglo-Commonwealth and US jurisprudence and legal education. While academic scholarship generally offers various forms of commentary on decided cases, feminist judgment-writing projects have recently embarked on a new form of critical scholarship. Rather than critiquing judgments from a feminist perspective in academic essays, the participants in these projects have set out instead to write alternative judgments, as if they had been one of the judges sitting on the court at the time. After introducing the UK Feminist Judgments Project and describing what is ‘different’ about the judgments it has produced, the paper explains some of the ways in which these judgments have been used in UK law schools to teach critical thinking. The paper finally speculates on the potential production and application of feminist judgments or their equivalents beyond the common law context. Este artículo analiza las sentencias feministas como un vehículo específico para enseñar a los estudiantes a analizar el derecho desde un punto de vista crítico. El análisis de las sentencias de apelación constituye un elemento central de la jurisprudencia y la enseñanza del derecho en los países angloamericanos y de la Commonwealth. Mientras la comunidad académica ofrece generalmente diversas formas de comentario de casos resueltos, los proyectos de literatura judicial feminista se han embarcado recientemente en un nuevo sistema de crítica académica. En lugar de redactar ensayos académicos criticando las sentencias judiciales desde una perspectiva feminista, los participantes de estos proyectos se han propuesto redactar sentencias alternativas, como si hubieran sido uno de los jueces del tribunal en cuestión. Después de presentar el Proyecto de Sentencias Feministas del Reino Unido y

  2. 41 CFR 105-68.920 - Civil judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... 41 Public Contracts and Property Management 3 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Civil judgment. 105-68... Administration 68-GOVERNMENTWIDE DEBARMENT AND SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 105-68.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction...

  3. Reflective journaling for clinical judgment development and evaluation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lasater, Kathie; Nielsen, Ann

    2009-01-01

    Reflective journaling is a strategy used often in clinical education to gain insight into students' clinical thinking; however, studies indicate that students may benefit from guided reflections. Numerous tools have been used to structure student reflection with varying results. This article describes the outcomes from using the Guide for Reflection based on Tanner's Clinical Judgment Model. The Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric, created from the Model, is used to evaluate development of clinical judgment and provides language to communicate about clinical thinking with students. Senior immersion course competencies, also developed with language from Tanner's Clinical Judgment Model,offer a comprehensive package that fosters students' clinical judgment development, faculty-student communication about clinical judgment, and evaluation of students' clinical thinking.

  4. Sensation of agency and perception of temporal order.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Timm, Jana; Schönwiesner, Marc; SanMiguel, Iria; Schröger, Erich

    2014-01-01

    After adaptation to a fixed temporal delay between actions and their sensory consequences, stimuli delivered during the delay are perceived to occur prior to actions. Temporal judgments are also influenced by the sensation of agency (experience of causing our own actions and their sensory consequences). Sensory consequences of voluntary actions are perceived to occur earlier in time than those of involuntary actions. However, it is unclear whether temporal order illusions influence the sensation of agency. Thus, we tested how the illusionary reversal of motor actions and sound events affect the sensation of agency. We observed an absence of the sensation of agency in the auditory modality in a condition in which sounds were falsely perceived as preceding motor acts relative to the perceived temporal order in the control condition. This finding suggests a strong association between the sensation of agency and the temporal order perception of actions and their consequences. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  5. Challenges of assessing critical thinking and clinical judgment in nurse practitioner students.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gorton, Karen L; Hayes, Janice

    2014-03-01

    The purpose of this study was to determine whether there was a relationship between critical thinking skills and clinical judgment in nurse practitioner students. The study used a convenience, nonprobability sampling technique, engaging participants from across the United States. Correlational analysis demonstrated no statistically significant relationship between critical thinking skills and examination-style questions, critical thinking skills and scores on the evaluation and reevaluation of consequences subscale of the Clinical Decision Making in Nursing Scale, and critical thinking skills and the preceptor evaluation tool. The study found no statistically significant relationships between critical thinking skills and clinical judgment. Educators and practitioners could consider further research in these areas to gain insight into how critical thinking is and could be measured, to gain insight into the clinical decision making skills of nurse practitioner students, and to gain insight into the development and measurement of critical thinking skills in advanced practice educational programs. Copyright 2014, SLACK Incorporated.

  6. Pitfalls in Teaching Judgment Heuristics

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shepperd, James A.; Koch, Erika J.

    2005-01-01

    Demonstrations of judgment heuristics typically focus on how heuristics can lead to poor judgments. However, exclusive focus on the negative consequences of heuristics can prove problematic. We illustrate the problem with the representativeness heuristic and present a study (N = 45) that examined how examples influence understanding of the…

  7. Risk Emotions and Risk Judgments: Passive Bodily Experience and Active Moral Reasoning in Judgmental Constellations.

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Coeckelbergh, Mark; Roeser, Sabine

    2010-01-01

    Experts typically accuse lay people of “emotional” responses to technological risk as opposed to their own “rational” judgment. This attitude is in tune with risk perception research that qualifies lay people’s responses in terms of bias. By contrast, cognitivists argue that emotions are judgments

  8. Cognitive judgment bias interacts with risk based decision making and sensitivity to dopaminergic challenge in rats

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Robert Drozd

    2016-08-01

    Full Text Available Although cognitive theory has implicated judgement bias in various psychopathologies, its role in decision making under risk remains relatively unexplored. In the present study we assessed the effects of cognitive judgment bias on risky choices in rats. First, we trained and tested the animals on the rat version of the probability-discounting task. During discrete trials, the rats chose between two levers; a press on the ‘small/certain’ lever always resulted in the delivery of one reward pellet, whereas a press on the ‘large/risky’ lever resulted in the delivery of four pellets. However, the probability of receiving a reward from the ‘large/risky’ lever gradually decreased over the four trial blocks. Subsequently, the rats were re-trained and evaluated on a series of ambiguous-cue interpretation tests, which permitted their classification according to the display of ‘optimistic’ or ‘pessimistic’ traits. Because dopamine has been implicated in both: risky choices and optimism, in the last experiment, we compared the reactivity of the dopaminergic system in the ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ animals using the apomorphine (2mg/kg s.c. sensitivity test. We demonstrated that as risk increased, the proportion of risky lever choices decreased significantly slower in ‘optimists’ compared with ‘pessimists’ and that these differences between the two groups of rats were associated with different levels of dopaminergic system reactivity. Our findings suggest that cognitive judgement bias, risky decision-making and dopamine are linked, and they provide a foundation for further investigation of the behavioural traits and cognitive processes that influence risky choices in animal models.

  9. Moral Motivation, Moral Judgment, and Antisocial Behavior

    Science.gov (United States)

    Brooks, Jeff; Bock, Tonia; Narvaez, Darcia

    2013-01-01

    The link between judgment and action is weak throughout psychology, including moral psychology. That is, people often do not act in accordance with their reasoning. Might moral judgment development be better viewed as a capacity that inhibits "immoral" behavior? One model that helps account for the moral judgment-action gap is Rest's…

  10. Making Temporal Search More Central in Spatial Data Infrastructures

    Science.gov (United States)

    Corti, P.; Lewis, B.

    2017-10-01

    A temporally enabled Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a framework of geospatial data, metadata, users, and tools intended to provide an efficient and flexible way to use spatial information which includes the historical dimension. One of the key software components of an SDI is the catalogue service which is needed to discover, query, and manage the metadata. A search engine is a software system capable of supporting fast and reliable search, which may use any means necessary to get users to the resources they need quickly and efficiently. These techniques may include features such as full text search, natural language processing, weighted results, temporal search based on enrichment, visualization of patterns in distributions of results in time and space using temporal and spatial faceting, and many others. In this paper we will focus on the temporal aspects of search which include temporal enrichment using a time miner - a software engine able to search for date components within a larger block of text, the storage of time ranges in the search engine, handling historical dates, and the use of temporal histograms in the user interface to display the temporal distribution of search results.

  11. A pattern recognition account of decision making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Massaro, D W

    1994-09-01

    In the domain of pattern recognition, experiments have shown that perceivers integrate multiple sources of information in an optimal manner. In contrast, other research has been interpreted to mean that decision making is nonoptimal. As an example, Tversky and Kahneman (1983) have shown that subjects commit a conjunction fallacy because they judge it more likely that a fictitious person named Linda is a bank teller and a feminist than just a bank teller. This judgment supposedly violates probability theory, because the probability of two events can never be greater than the probability of either event alone. The present research tests the hypothesis that subjects interpret this judgment task as a pattern recognition task. If this hypothesis is correct, subjects' judgments should be described accurately by the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP)--a successful model of pattern recognition. In the first experiment, the Linda task was extended to an expanded factorial design with five vocations and five avocations. The probability ratings were described well by the FLMP and described poorly by a simple probability model. The second experiment included (1) two fictitious people, Linda and Joan, as response alternatives and (2) both ratings and categorization judgments. Although the ratings were accurately described by both the FLMP and an averaging of the sources of information, the categorization judgments were described better by the FLMP. These results reveal important similarities in recognizing patterns and in decision making. Given that the FLMP is an optimal method for combining multiple sources of information, the probability judgments appear to be optimal in the same manner as pattern-recognition judgments.

  12. Deliberation's blindsight: how cognitive load can improve judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hoffmann, Janina A; von Helversen, Bettina; Rieskamp, Jörg

    2013-06-01

    Multitasking poses a major challenge in modern work environments by putting the worker under cognitive load. Performance decrements often occur when people are under high cognitive load because they switch to less demanding--and often less accurate--cognitive strategies. Although cognitive load disturbs performance over a wide range of tasks, it may also carry benefits. In the experiments reported here, we showed that judgment performance can increase under cognitive load. Participants solved a multiple-cue judgment task in which high performance could be achieved by using a similarity-based judgment strategy but not by using a more demanding rule-based judgment strategy. Accordingly, cognitive load induced a shift to a similarity-based judgment strategy, which consequently led to more accurate judgments. By contrast, shifting to a similarity-based strategy harmed judgments in a task best solved by using a rule-based strategy. These results show how important it is to consider the cognitive strategies people rely on to understand how people perform in demanding work environments.

  13. Moral Judgment as Information Processing: An Integrative Review

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Steve eGuglielmo

    2015-10-01

    Full Text Available This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two fundamental questions: (1 What input information guides moral judgments?; and (2 What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework, critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds, outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and offers conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information processing perspective provides a useful theoretical framework for organizing extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment.

  14. Neural correlates of conventional and harm/welfare-based moral decision-making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    White, Stuart F; Zhao, Hui; Leong, Kelly Kimiko; Smetana, Judith G; Nucci, Larry P; Blair, R James R

    2017-12-01

    The degree to which social norms are processed by a unitary system or dissociable systems remains debated. Much research on children's social-cognitive judgments has supported the distinction between "moral" (harm/welfare-based) and "conventional" norms. However, the extent to which these norms are processed by dissociable neural systems remains unclear. To address this issue, 23 healthy participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they rated the wrongness of harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions and neutral vignettes. Activation significantly greater than the neutral vignette baseline was observed in regions implicated in decision-making regions including rostral/ventral medial frontal, anterior insula and dorsomedial frontal cortices when evaluating both harm/welfare-based and social-conventional transgressions. Greater activation when rating harm/welfare-based relative to social-conventional transgressions was seen through much of ACC and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. Greater activation was observed in superior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus, left PCC, and temporal-parietal junction when rating social-conventional transgressions relative to harm/welfare-based transgressions. These data suggest that decisions regarding the wrongness of actions, irrespective of whether they involve care/harm-based or conventional transgressions, recruit regions generally implicated in affect-based decision-making. However, there is neural differentiation between harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions. This may reflect the particular importance of processing the intent of transgressors of conventional norms and perhaps the greater emotional content or salience of harm/welfare-based transgressions.

  15. The Arithmetic of Emotion: Integration of Incidental and Integral Affect in Judgments and Decisions

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Daniel eVastfjall

    2016-03-01

    Full Text Available Research has demonstrated that two types of affect have an influence on judgment and decision making: incidental affect (affect unrelated to a judgment or decision such as a mood and integral affect (affect that is part of the perceiver’s internal representation of the option or target under consideration. So far, these two lines of research have seldom crossed so that knowledge concerning their combined effects is largely missing. To fill this gap, the present review highlights differences and similarities between integral and incidental affect. Further, common and unique mechanisms that enable these two types of affect to influence judgment and choices are identified. Finally, some basic principles for affect integration when the two sources co-occur are outlined. These principles are discussed in relation to existing work that has focused on incidental or integral affect but not both.

  16. Emotion and deliberative reasoning in moral judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Denise Dellarosa Cummins

    2012-09-01

    Full Text Available According to an influential dual-process model, a moral judgment is the outcome of a rapid, affect-laden process and a slower, deliberative process. If these outputs conflict, decision time is increased in order to resolve the conflict. Violations of deontological principles proscribing the use of personal force to inflict intentional harm are presumed to elicit negative affect which biases judgments early in the decision-making process. This model was tested in three experiments. Moral dilemmas were classified using (a decision time and consensus as measures of system conflict and (b the aforementioned deontological criteria. In Experiment 1, decision time was either unlimited or reduced. The dilemmas asked whether it was appropriate to take a morally questionable action to produce a greater good outcome. Limiting decision time reduced the proportion of utilitarian (yes decisions, but contrary to the model’s predictions, (a vignettes that involved more deontological violations logged faster decision times, and (b violation of deontological principles was not predictive of decisional conflict profiles. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that time pressure simply makes people more like to say no. Participants made a first decision under time constraints and a second decision under no time constraints. One group was asked whether it was appropriate to take the morally questionable action while a second group was asked whether it was appropriate to refuse to take the action. The results replicated that of Experiment 1 regardless of whether yes or no constituted a utilitarian decision. In Experiment 3, participants rated the pleasantness of positive visual stimuli prior to making a decision. Contrary to the model’s predictions, the number of deontological decisions increased in the positive affect rating group compared to a group that engaged in a cognitive task or a control group that engaged in neither task. These results are consistent

  17. Complexity of Judgment: What Makes Possible the Convergence of Expert and Nonexpert Ratings in Assessing Creativity

    Science.gov (United States)

    Galati, Francesco

    2015-01-01

    This work is part of the debate regarding the possibility to judge the creativity of a particular object (an idea, a painting, an industrial product, etc.), by expert or nonexpert raters, with the same results or not. The study is focused on the concept "complexity of judgment" considered fundamental to fully understand the problem. The…

  18. Involvement of right piriform cortex in olfactory familiarity judgments. : Familiarity judgment in olfaction

    OpenAIRE

    Plailly , Jane; Bensafi , Moustafa; Pachot-Clouard , Mathilde; Delon-Martin , Chantal; Kareken , David ,; Rouby , Catherine; Segebarth , Christoph; Royet , Jean ,

    2005-01-01

    International audience; Previous studies have shown activation of right orbitofrontal cortex during judgments of odor familiarity. In the present study, we sought to extend our knowledge about the neural circuits involved in such a task by exploring the involvement of the right prefrontal areas and limbic/primary olfactory structures. Fourteen right-handed male subjects were tested using fMRI with a single functional run of two olfactory conditions (odor detection and familiarity judgments). ...

  19. How much participation makes a participatory process legitimate? Observations from participants in forestry policy-making and nuclear weapons complex management

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Tuler, S.

    1997-01-01

    Public participation has received increasing attention as a means for improving research, policy-making, and decision-making in a variety of contexts. Regulators have experimented with a variety of participatory approaches to improve the legitimacy of outcomes in the eyes of diverse publics. In this paper the authors will explore how participants (as opposed to planners) perceived legitimacy of both processes and outcomes in planning processes. Data from two case studies will be presented: (1) a forestry planning process in the northeastern US and (2) environmental health, waste management, and clean-up activities in the US nuclear weapons complex. The data reveal that judgments about the appropriateness of particular forms of participation and about the quality of participation can be a critical factor in perceived legitimacy of processes and outcomes, and that judgments of appropriateness and quality are grounded in the experiences of individual participants. In addition, linkages between judgments about the adequacy of participation and legitimacy can be mediated by historical interactions and judgments of trust. Implications for the design of participatory processes will be discussed

  20. On the balanced blending of formally structured and simplified approaches for utilizing judgments of experts in the assessment of uncertain issues

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Ahn, Kwang Il; Yang, Joon Eon; Ha, Jae Joo

    2003-01-01

    Expert judgment is frequently employed in the search for the solution to various engineering and decision-making problems where relevant data is not sufficient or where there is little consensus as to the correct models to apply. When expert judgments are required to solve the underlying problem, our main concern is how to formally derive their technical expertise and their personal degree of familiarity about the related questions. Formal methods for gathering judgments from experts and assessing the effects of the judgments on the results of the analysis have been developed in a variety of ways. The most important interest of such methods is to establish the robustness of an expert's knowledge upon which the elicitation of judgments is made and an effective trace of the elicitation process as possible as one can. While the resultant expert judgments can remain to a large extent substantiated with formal elicitation methods, their applicability however is often limited due to restriction of available resources (e.g., time, budget, and number of qualified experts, etc) as well as a scope of the analysis. For this reason, many engineering and decision-making problems have not always performed with a formal/structured pattern, but rather relied on a pertinent transition of the formal process to the simplified approach. The purpose of this paper is (a) to address some insights into the balanced use of formally structured and simplified approaches for the explicit use of expert judgments under resource constraints and (b) to discuss related decision-theoretic issues

  1. Electrophysiological difference between the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Qingfei; Liang, Xiuling; Lei, Yi; Li, Hong

    2015-05-01

    Causally related concepts like "virus" and "epidemic" and general associatively related concepts like "ring" and "emerald" are represented and accessed separately. The Evoked Response Potential (ERP) procedure was used to examine the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory. Participants were required to remember a task cue (causal or associative) presented at the beginning of each trial, and assess whether the relationship between subsequently presented words matched the initial task cue. The ERP data showed that an N400 effect (250-450 ms) was more negative for unrelated words than for all related words. Furthermore, the N400 effect elicited by causal relations was more positive than for associative relations in causal cue condition, whereas no significant difference was found in the associative cue condition. The centrally distributed late ERP component (650-750 ms) elicited by the causal cue condition was more positive than for the associative cue condition. These results suggested that the processing of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory recruited different degrees of attentional and executive resources. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  2. Using expert judgments to explore robust alternatives for forest management under climate change.

    Science.gov (United States)

    McDaniels, Timothy; Mills, Tamsin; Gregory, Robin; Ohlson, Dan

    2012-12-01

    We develop and apply a judgment-based approach to selecting robust alternatives, which are defined here as reasonably likely to achieve objectives, over a range of uncertainties. The intent is to develop an approach that is more practical in terms of data and analysis requirements than current approaches, informed by the literature and experience with probability elicitation and judgmental forecasting. The context involves decisions about managing forest lands that have been severely affected by mountain pine beetles in British Columbia, a pest infestation that is climate-exacerbated. A forest management decision was developed as the basis for the context, objectives, and alternatives for land management actions, to frame and condition the judgments. A wide range of climate forecasts, taken to represent the 10-90% levels on cumulative distributions for future climate, were developed to condition judgments. An elicitation instrument was developed, tested, and revised to serve as the basis for eliciting probabilistic three-point distributions regarding the performance of selected alternatives, over a set of relevant objectives, in the short and long term. The elicitations were conducted in a workshop comprising 14 regional forest management specialists. We employed the concept of stochastic dominance to help identify robust alternatives. We used extensive sensitivity analysis to explore the patterns in the judgments, and also considered the preferred alternatives for each individual expert. The results show that two alternatives that are more flexible than the current policies are judged more likely to perform better than the current alternatives on average in terms of stochastic dominance. The results suggest judgmental approaches to robust decision making deserve greater attention and testing. © 2012 Society for Risk Analysis.

  3. Process and representation in multiple-cue judgment

    OpenAIRE

    Olsson, Anna-Carin

    2002-01-01

    This thesis investigates the cognitive processes and representations underlying human judgment in a multiple-cue judgment task. Several recent models assume that people have several qualitatively distinct and competing levels of knowledge representations (Ashby, Alfonso-Reese, Turken, & Waldron, 1998; Erickson & Kruschke, 1998; Nosofsky, Palmeri, & McKinley, 1994; Sloman, 1996). The most successful cognitive models in categorization and multiple-cue judgment are, respectively, exe...

  4. A STUDY OF ESTHETIC JUDGMENT.

    Science.gov (United States)

    CHILD, IRVIN L.

    THE ABILITY OF COLLEGE STUDENTS TO RECOGNIZE DEGREES OF ESTHETIC MERIT IN OBJECTS OF ART WAS STUDIED. THE OBJECTIVE WAS TO DETERMINE BY EXPERIMENTATION SOME OF THE FACTORS WHICH MAY BE IMPORTANT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESTHETIC JUDGMENT. A SAMPLE OF MALE COLLEGE STUDENTS WAS GIVEN SEVERAL TESTS OF ESTHETIC JUDGMENT. FROM THESE SUBJECTS WERE CHOSEN…

  5. Using Social Judgment Theory method to examine how experienced occupational therapy driver assessors use information to make fitness-to-drive recommendations

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harries, Priscilla; Davies, Miranda

    2015-01-01

    Introduction As people with a range of disabilities strive to increase their community mobility, occupational therapy driver assessors are increasingly required to make complex recommendations regarding fitness-to-drive. However, very little is known about how therapists use information to make decisions. The aim of this study was to model how experienced occupational therapy driver assessors weight and combine information when making fitness-to-drive recommendations and establish their level of decision agreement. Method Using Social Judgment Theory method, this study examined how 45 experienced occupational therapy driver assessors from the UK, Australia and New Zealand made fitness-to-drive recommendations for a series of 64 case scenarios. Participants completed the task on a dedicated website, and data were analysed using discriminant function analysis and an intraclass correlation coefficient. Results Accounting for 87% of the variance, the cues central to the fitness-to-drive recommendations made by assessors are the client’s physical skills, cognitive and perceptual skills, road law craft skills, vehicle handling skills and the number of driving instructor interventions. Agreement (consensus) between fitness-to-drive recommendations was very high: intraclass correlation coefficient = .97, 95% confidence interval .96–.98). Conclusion Findings can be used by both experienced and novice driver assessors to reflect on and strengthen the fitness-to-drive recommendations made to clients. PMID:26435572

  6. Expert judgment in assessing radwaste risks: What Nevadans should know about Yucca Mountain; [Final report

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Shrader-Frechette, K. [University of South Florida, Tampa, FL (United States)

    1992-06-01

    For phenomena characterized by accurate and largely complete data, quantitative risk assessment (QRA) provides extraordinarily valuable and objective information. However, with phenomena for which the data, models, or probabilities are incomplete or uncertain, QRA may be less useful and more questionable, because its conclusions are typically empirically and theoretically underdetermined. In the face of empirical or theoretical underdetermination, scientists often are forced to make a number of methodological value judgments and inferences about how to estimate and evaluate the associated risks. The purpose of this project is to evaluate instances of methodological value judgments and invalid or imprecise inferences that have occurred in the QRA done for the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste facility. We shall show (1) that questionable methodological value judgments and inferences have occurred in some Yucca Mountain QRA`S; (2) that questionable judgments and inferences, similar to those in the Yucca Mountain studies, have occurred in previous QRA`s done for other radiation-related facilities and have likely caused earlier QRA`s to err in specific ways; and (3) that, because the value judgments and problems associated with some Yucca Mountain QRA`s include repetitions of similar difficulties in earlier studies, therefore the QRA conclusions of some Yucca Mountain analyses are, at best, uncertain.

  7. Empathy as a neuropsychological heuristic in social decision-making

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Ramsøy, Thomas Z.; Skov, Martin; Macoveanu, Julian

    2015-01-01

    Decision-making in social dilemmas is suggested to rely on three factors: the valuation of a choice option, the relative judgment of two or more choice alternatives, and individual factors affecting the ease at which judgments and decisions are made. Here, we test whether empathy—an individual’s ...

  8. The Influence of Judgment Calls on Meta-Analytic Findings.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tarrahi, Farid; Eisend, Martin

    2016-01-01

    Previous research has suggested that judgment calls (i.e., methodological choices made in the process of conducting a meta-analysis) have a strong influence on meta-analytic findings and question their robustness. However, prior research applies case study comparison or reanalysis of a few meta-analyses with a focus on a few selected judgment calls. These studies neglect the fact that different judgment calls are related to each other and simultaneously influence the outcomes of a meta-analysis, and that meta-analytic findings can vary due to non-judgment call differences between meta-analyses (e.g., variations of effects over time). The current study analyzes the influence of 13 judgment calls in 176 meta-analyses in marketing research by applying a multivariate, multilevel meta-meta-analysis. The analysis considers simultaneous influences from different judgment calls on meta-analytic effect sizes and controls for alternative explanations based on non-judgment call differences between meta-analyses. The findings suggest that judgment calls have only a minor influence on meta-analytic findings, whereas non-judgment call differences between meta-analyses are more likely to explain differences in meta-analytic findings. The findings support the robustness of meta-analytic results and conclusions.

  9. People's Judgments About Classic Property Law Cases.

    Science.gov (United States)

    DeScioli, Peter; Karpoff, Rachel

    2015-06-01

    People's judgments about property shape how they relate to other people with respect to resources. Property law cases can provide a valuable window into ownership judgments because disputants often use conflicting rules for ownership, offering opportunities to distinguish these basic rules. Here we report a series of ten studies investigating people's judgments about classic property law cases dealing with found objects. The cases address a range of issues, including the relativity of ownership, finder versus landowner rights, object location, objects below- versus above-ground, mislaid versus lost objects, contracts between landowners and finders, and the distinction between public and private space. The results show nuanced patterns in ownership judgments that are not well-explained by previous psychological theories. Also, people's judgments often conflict with court decisions and legal principles. These empirical patterns can be used to generate and test novel hypotheses about the intuitive logic of ownership.

  10. [Temporal and spatial heterogeneity analysis of optimal value of sensitive parameters in ecological process model: The BIOME-BGC model as an example.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Yi Zhe; Zhang, Ting Long; Liu, Qiu Yu; Li, Ying

    2018-01-01

    The ecological process models are powerful tools for studying terrestrial ecosystem water and carbon cycle at present. However, there are many parameters for these models, and weather the reasonable values of these parameters were taken, have important impact on the models simulation results. In the past, the sensitivity and the optimization of model parameters were analyzed and discussed in many researches. But the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the optimal parameters is less concerned. In this paper, the BIOME-BGC model was used as an example. In the evergreen broad-leaved forest, deciduous broad-leaved forest and C3 grassland, the sensitive parameters of the model were selected by constructing the sensitivity judgment index with two experimental sites selected under each vegetation type. The objective function was constructed by using the simulated annealing algorithm combined with the flux data to obtain the monthly optimal values of the sensitive parameters at each site. Then we constructed the temporal heterogeneity judgment index, the spatial heterogeneity judgment index and the temporal and spatial heterogeneity judgment index to quantitatively analyze the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the optimal values of the model sensitive parameters. The results showed that the sensitivity of BIOME-BGC model parameters was different under different vegetation types, but the selected sensitive parameters were mostly consistent. The optimal values of the sensitive parameters of BIOME-BGC model mostly presented time-space heterogeneity to different degrees which varied with vegetation types. The sensitive parameters related to vegetation physiology and ecology had relatively little temporal and spatial heterogeneity while those related to environment and phenology had generally larger temporal and spatial heterogeneity. In addition, the temporal heterogeneity of the optimal values of the model sensitive parameters showed a significant linear correlation

  11. Frontal, Striatal, and Medial Temporal Sensitivity to Value Distinguishes Risk-Taking from Risk-Aversive Older Adults during Decision Making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Goh, Joshua O S; Su, Yu-Shiang; Tang, Yong-Jheng; McCarrey, Anna C; Tereshchenko, Alexander; Elkins, Wendy; Resnick, Susan M

    2016-12-07

    Aging compromises the frontal, striatal, and medial temporal areas of the reward system, impeding accurate value representation and feedback processing critical for decision making. However, substantial variability characterizes age-related effects on the brain so that some older individuals evince clear neurocognitive declines whereas others are spared. Moreover, the functional correlates of normative individual differences in older-adult value-based decision making remain unclear. We performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in 173 human older adults during a lottery choice task in which costly to more desirable stakes were depicted using low to high expected values (EVs) of points. Across trials that varied in EVs, participants decided to accept or decline the offered stakes to maximize total accumulated points. We found that greater age was associated with less optimal decisions, accepting stakes when losses were likely and declining stakes when gains were likely, and was associated with increased frontal activity for costlier stakes. Critically, risk preferences varied substantially across older adults and neural sensitivity to EVs in the frontal, striatal, and medial temporal areas dissociated risk-aversive from risk-taking individuals. Specifically, risk-averters increased neural responses to increasing EVs as stakes became more desirable, whereas risk-takers increased neural responses with decreasing EV as stakes became more costly. Risk preference also modulated striatal responses during feedback with risk-takers showing more positive responses to gains compared with risk-averters. Our findings highlight the frontal, striatal, and medial temporal areas as key neural loci in which individual differences differentially affect value-based decision-making ability in older adults. Frontal, striatal, and medial temporal functions implicated in value-based decision processing of rewards and costs undergo substantial age-related changes. However, age

  12. The Impact of Feedback on the Different Time Courses of Multisensory Temporal Recalibration

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Matthew A. De Niear

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available The capacity to rapidly adjust perceptual representations confers a fundamental advantage when confronted with a constantly changing world. Unexplored is how feedback regarding sensory judgments (top-down factors interacts with sensory statistics (bottom-up factors to drive long- and short-term recalibration of multisensory perceptual representations. Here, we examined the time course of both cumulative and rapid temporal perceptual recalibration for individuals completing an audiovisual simultaneity judgment task in which they were provided with varying degrees of feedback. We find that in the presence of feedback (as opposed to simple sensory exposure temporal recalibration is more robust. Additionally, differential time courses are seen for cumulative and rapid recalibration dependent upon the nature of the feedback provided. Whereas cumulative recalibration effects relied more heavily on feedback that informs (i.e., negative feedback rather than confirms (i.e., positive feedback the judgment, rapid recalibration shows the opposite tendency. Furthermore, differential effects on rapid and cumulative recalibration were seen when the reliability of feedback was altered. Collectively, our findings illustrate that feedback signals promote and sustain audiovisual recalibration over the course of cumulative learning and enhance rapid trial-to-trial learning. Furthermore, given the differential effects seen for cumulative and rapid recalibration, these processes may function via distinct mechanisms.

  13. Adductor spasmodic dysphonia: Relationships between acoustic indices and perceptual judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cannito, Michael P.; Sapienza, Christine M.; Woodson, Gayle; Murry, Thomas

    2003-04-01

    This study investigated relationships between acoustical indices of spasmodic dysphonia and perceptual scaling judgments of voice attributes made by expert listeners. Audio-recordings of The Rainbow Passage were obtained from thirty one speakers with spasmodic dysphonia before and after a BOTOX injection of the vocal folds. Six temporal acoustic measures were obtained across 15 words excerpted from each reading sample, including both frequency of occurrence and percent time for (1) aperiodic phonation, (2) phonation breaks, and (3) fundamental frequency shifts. Visual analog scaling judgments were also obtained from six voice experts using an interactive computer interface to quantify four voice attributes (i.e., overall quality, roughness, brokenness, breathiness) in a carefully psychoacoustically controlled environment, using the same reading passages as stimuli. Number and percent aperiodicity and phonation breaks correlated significanly with perceived overall voice quality, roughness, and brokenness before and after the BOTOX injection. Breathiness was correlated with aperidocity only prior to injection, while roughness also correlated with frequency shifts following injection. Factor analysis reduced perceived attributes to two principal components: glottal squeezing and breathiness. The acoustic measures demonstrated a strong regression relationship with perceived glottal squeezing, but no regression relationship with breathiness was observed. Implications for an analysis of pathologic voices will be discussed.

  14. 40 CFR 194.26 - Expert judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... CFR PART 191 DISPOSAL REGULATIONS Compliance Certification and Re-certification General Requirements... experts (by name and employer) involved in any expert judgment elicitation processes used to support the... judgment elicitation processes and the reasoning behind those results. Documentation of interviews used to...

  15. 32 CFR 1602.13 - Judgmental Classification.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... 32 National Defense 6 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Judgmental Classification. 1602.13 Section 1602.13 National Defense Other Regulations Relating to National Defense SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM DEFINITIONS § 1602.13 Judgmental Classification. A classification action relating to a registrant's claim for...

  16. Examining corporate reputation judgments with generalizability theory.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Highhouse, Scott; Broadfoot, Alison; Yugo, Jennifer E; Devendorf, Shelba A

    2009-05-01

    The researchers used generalizability theory to examine whether reputation judgments about corporations function in a manner consistent with contemporary theory in the corporate-reputation literature. University professors (n = 86) of finance, marketing, and human resources management made repeated judgments about the general reputations of highly visible American companies. Minimal variability in the judgments is explained by items, time, persons, and field of specialization. Moreover, experts from the different specializations reveal considerable agreement in how they weigh different aspects of corporate performance in arriving at their global reputation judgments. The results generally support the theory of the reputation construct and suggest that stable estimates of global reputation can be achieved with a small number of items and experts. (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

  17. To push or not to push? Affective influences on moral judgment depend on decision frame.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pastötter, Bernhard; Gleixner, Sabine; Neuhauser, Theresa; Bäuml, Karl-Heinz T

    2013-03-01

    People's moods can influence moral judgment. Such influences may arise because moods affect moral emotion, or because moods affect moral thought. The present study provides evidence that, at least in the footbridge dilemma, moods affect moral thought. The results of two experiments are reported in which, after induction of positive, negative, or neutral moods and presentation of the footbridge scenario, participants were asked one of two differentially framed closing questions. In the active frame, participants were asked whether they would be active and push the man, making thoughts about pushing accessible; in the passive frame, they were asked whether they would be passive and not push the man, making thoughts about not pushing accessible. The results show that affective influences on moral judgment depended on participants' decision frame. Compared to neutral moods, positive moods induced utilitarian responding - i.e., deciding to push - in the active decision frame, but induced nonutilitarian responding - i.e., deciding to not push - in the passive decision frame; in negative moods, exactly the opposite picture arose. The results suggest that people's moods affect moral judgment by conferring value on moral thought. Positive moods promote and negative moods inhibit accessible thoughts. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  18. Medical Students' Development of Ethical Judgment - Exploring the Learners' Perspectives using a mixed methods approach.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Langer, Thorsten; Jazmati, Danny; Jung, Ole; Schulz, Christian; Schnell, Martin W

    2016-01-01

    Objective: Contemporary healthcare requires physicians to have well developed ethical judgment skills in addition to excellent clinical skills. However, no consensus has been reached on how to best teach ethical judgment skills during medical training. Previous studies revealed inconclusive results and applied varying theoretical frameworks. To date, the students' perspectives on their development in ethical judgment has received less attention. Better insights in the learners' experiences can help to improve educational interventions in medical ethics. Methods: A vignette featuring a challenging case with opposing views between a patient's parents and a physician followed by a questionnaire was presented to a cohort of medical students at a German medical school at three points in time during their medical training (Year 1, 2 and 5). The questionnaire included closed and open-ended questions addressing the participant's preferred, hypothetical actions, their reasoning as well as the resources informing their reasoning. Content analysis was used for qualitative data; frequencies and percentages were used to describe quantitative findings. Results: The response rate remained stable (28%) over the study period. Participants' responses changed overtime. Accepting parents' autonomy in the decision-making process was the majority standpoint of students in year 1 and 2 and became less often cited in year 5 (Year 1/2/5: 68/67/48%). On the contrary, not readily following the parents' decision for medical reasons was a minority standpoint in year 1 and became more prevalent over time (year 1/2/5: 12/17/42%). Judgments were only partly based on ethics training. Instead, participants drew on experiences from their clinical clerkships and their personal lives. Throughout the study, participants did not feel well-prepared to make a judgment in the case (Average 2.7 on a Likert-Scale; 1=very well prepared, 4=very poor). Conclusions: Over the course of their medical training, the

  19. The self-pleasantness judgment modulates the encoding performance and the Default Mode Network activity

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Perrone-Bertolotti eMarcela

    2016-03-01

    Full Text Available In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI study, we evaluated the effect of self-relevance on cerebral activity and behavioral performance during an incidental encoding task. Recent findings suggest that pleasantness judgments reliably induce self-oriented (internal thoughts and increase default mode network (DMN activity. We hypothesized that this increase in DMN activity would relate to increased memory recognition for pleasantly-judged stimuli (which depend on internally-oriented attention but decreased recognition for unpleasantly-judged items (which depend on externally-oriented attention. To test this hypothesis, brain activity was recorded from 21 healthy participants while they performed a pleasantness judgment requiring them to rate visual stimuli as pleasant or unpleasant. One hour later, participants performed a surprise memory recognition test outside of the scanner. Thus, we were able to evaluate the effects of pleasant and unpleasant judgments on cerebral activity and incidental encoding. The behavioral results showed that memory recognition was better for items rated as pleasant than items rated as unpleasant. The whole brain analysis indicated that successful encoding activates the inferior frontal and lateral temporal cortices, whereas unsuccessful encoding recruits two key medial posterior DMN regions, the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus. A region of interest analysis including classic DMN areas, revealed significantly greater involvement of the medial Prefrontal Cortex in pleasant compared to unpleasant judgments, suggesting this region’s involvement in self-referential (i.e., internal processing. This area may be responsible for the greater recognition performance seen for pleasant stimuli. Furthermore, a significant interaction between the encoding performance (successful vs. unsuccessful and pleasantness was observed for the posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus and inferior frontal gyrus. Overall, our

  20. Task-modulated activation and functional connectivity of the temporal and frontal areas during speech comprehension.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yue, Q; Zhang, L; Xu, G; Shu, H; Li, P

    2013-05-01

    There is general consensus in the literature that a distributed network of temporal and frontal brain areas is involved in speech comprehension. However, how active versus passive tasks modulate the activation and the functional connectivity of the critical brain areas is not clearly understood. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify intelligibility and task-related effects in speech comprehension. Participants performed a semantic judgment task on normal and time-reversed sentences, or passively listened to the sentences without making an overt response. The subtraction analysis demonstrated that passive sentence comprehension mainly engaged brain areas in the left anterior and posterior superior temporal sulcus and middle temporal gyrus (aSTS/MTG and pSTS/MTG), whereas active sentence comprehension recruited bilateral frontal regions in addition to the aSTS/MTG and pSTS/MTG regions. Functional connectivity analysis revealed that during passive sentence comprehension, the left aSTS/MTG was functionally connected with the left Heschl's gyrus (HG) and bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) but no area was functionally connected with the left pSTS/MTG; during active sentence comprehension, however, both the left aSTS/MTG and pSTS/MTG were functionally connected with bilateral superior temporal and inferior frontal areas. While these results are consistent with the view that the ventral stream of the temporo-frontal network subserves semantic processing, our findings further indicate that both the activation and the functional connectivity of the temporal and frontal areas are modulated by task demands. Copyright © 2013 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  1. Judgment sampling: a health care improvement perspective.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Perla, Rocco J; Provost, Lloyd P

    2012-01-01

    Sampling plays a major role in quality improvement work. Random sampling (assumed by most traditional statistical methods) is the exception in improvement situations. In most cases, some type of "judgment sample" is used to collect data from a system. Unfortunately, judgment sampling is not well understood. Judgment sampling relies upon those with process and subject matter knowledge to select useful samples for learning about process performance and the impact of changes over time. It many cases, where the goal is to learn about or improve a specific process or system, judgment samples are not merely the most convenient and economical approach, they are technically and conceptually the most appropriate approach. This is because improvement work is done in the real world in complex situations involving specific areas of concern and focus; in these situations, the assumptions of classical measurement theory neither can be met nor should an attempt be made to meet them. The purpose of this article is to describe judgment sampling and its importance in quality improvement work and studies with a focus on health care settings.

  2. Implications of Cognitive Load for Hypothesis Generation and Probability Judgment.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Amber M Sprenger

    2011-06-01

    Full Text Available We tested the predictions of HyGene (Thomas, Dougherty, Sprenger, & Harbison, 2008 that both divided attention at encoding and judgment should affect degree to which participants’ probability judgments violate the principle of additivity. In two experiments, we showed that divided attention during judgment leads to an increase in subadditivity, suggesting that the comparison process for probability judgments is capacity limited. Contrary to the predictions of HyGene, a third experiment revealed that divided attention during encoding leads to an increase in later probability judgment made under full attention. The effect of divided attention at encoding on judgment was completely mediated by the number of hypotheses participants generated, indicating that limitations in both encoding and recall can cascade into biases in judgments.

  3. Probative value of absolute and relative judgments in eyewitness identification.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Clark, Steven E; Erickson, Michael A; Breneman, Jesse

    2011-10-01

    It is well-accepted that eyewitness identification decisions based on relative judgments are less accurate than identification decisions based on absolute judgments. However, the theoretical foundation for this view has not been established. In this study relative and absolute judgments were compared through simulations of the WITNESS model (Clark, Appl Cogn Psychol 17:629-654, 2003) to address the question: Do suspect identifications based on absolute judgments have higher probative value than suspect identifications based on relative judgments? Simulations of the WITNESS model showed a consistent advantage for absolute judgments over relative judgments for suspect-matched lineups. However, simulations of same-foils lineups showed a complex interaction based on the accuracy of memory and the similarity relationships among lineup members.

  4. Implications of Cognitive Load for Hypothesis Generation and Probability Judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sprenger, Amber M.; Dougherty, Michael R.; Atkins, Sharona M.; Franco-Watkins, Ana M.; Thomas, Rick P.; Lange, Nicholas; Abbs, Brandon

    2011-01-01

    We tested the predictions of HyGene (Thomas et al., 2008) that both divided attention at encoding and judgment should affect the degree to which participants’ probability judgments violate the principle of additivity. In two experiments, we showed that divided attention during judgment leads to an increase in subadditivity, suggesting that the comparison process for probability judgments is capacity limited. Contrary to the predictions of HyGene, a third experiment revealed that divided attention during encoding leads to an increase in later probability judgment made under full attention. The effect of divided attention during encoding on judgment was completely mediated by the number of hypotheses participants generated, indicating that limitations in both encoding and recall can cascade into biases in judgments. PMID:21734897

  5. Faulty judgment, expert opinion, and decision-making capacity.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Silberfeld, M; Checkland, D

    1999-08-01

    An assessment of decision-making capacity is the accepted procedure for determining when a person is not competent. An inferential gap exists between the criteria for capacity specific abilities and the legal requirements to understand relevant information and appreciate the consequences of a decision. This gap extends to causal influences on a person's capacity to decide. Using a published case of depression, we illustrate that assessors' uses of diagnostic information is frequently not up to the task of bridging this inferential gap in a justifiable way. We then describe cases of faulty judgement which challenge the understanding of diagnostic causal influences. These cases help to clarify the nature of the expertise required for capacity assessments. In practice, the requirements of decision-making capacity are often abandoned to other considerations due to a lack of requisite expertise. The legal policy supporting decision-making capacity as a means to protective intervention is justified only if the requisite expertise is developed. We propose the requisite expertise to be developed in the long term as a distinct multidisciplinary endeavour.

  6. Temporally Regular Musical Primes Facilitate Subsequent Syntax Processing in Children with Specific Language Impairment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bedoin, Nathalie; Brisseau, Lucie; Molinier, Pauline; Roch, Didier; Tillmann, Barbara

    2016-01-01

    Children with developmental language disorders have been shown to be also impaired in rhythm and meter perception. Temporal processing and its link to language processing can be understood within the dynamic attending theory. An external stimulus can stimulate internal oscillators, which orient attention over time and drive speech signal segmentation to provide benefits for syntax processing, which is impaired in various patient populations. For children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and dyslexia, previous research has shown the influence of an external rhythmic stimulation on subsequent language processing by comparing the influence of a temporally regular musical prime to that of a temporally irregular prime. Here we tested whether the observed rhythmic stimulation effect is indeed due to a benefit provided by the regular musical prime (rather than a cost subsequent to the temporally irregular prime). Sixteen children with SLI and 16 age-matched controls listened to either a regular musical prime sequence or an environmental sound scene (without temporal regularities in event occurrence; i.e., referred to as "baseline condition") followed by grammatically correct and incorrect sentences. They were required to perform grammaticality judgments for each auditorily presented sentence. Results revealed that performance for the grammaticality judgments was better after the regular prime sequences than after the baseline sequences. Our findings are interpreted in the theoretical framework of the dynamic attending theory (Jones, 1976) and the temporal sampling (oscillatory) framework for developmental language disorders (Goswami, 2011). Furthermore, they encourage the use of rhythmic structures (even in non-verbal materials) to boost linguistic structure processing and outline perspectives for rehabilitation.

  7. Effects of track and threat information on judgments of hurricane strike probability.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wu, Hao-Che; Lindell, Michael K; Prater, Carla S; Samuelson, Charles D

    2014-06-01

    Although evacuation is one of the best strategies for protecting citizens from hurricane threat, the ways that local elected officials use hurricane data in deciding whether to issue hurricane evacuation orders is not well understood. To begin to address this problem, we examined the effects of hurricane track and intensity information in a laboratory setting where participants judged the probability that hypothetical hurricanes with a constant bearing (i.e., straight line forecast track) would make landfall in each of eight 45 degree sectors around the Gulf of Mexico. The results from 162 participants in a student sample showed that the judged strike probability distributions over the eight sectors within each scenario were, unsurprisingly, unimodal and centered on the sector toward which the forecast track pointed. More significantly, although strike probability judgments for the sector in the direction of the forecast track were generally higher than the corresponding judgments for the other sectors, the latter were not zero. Most significantly, there were no appreciable differences in the patterns of strike probability judgments for hurricane tracks represented by a forecast track only, an uncertainty cone only, or forecast track with an uncertainty cone-a result consistent with a recent survey of coastal residents threatened by Hurricane Charley. The study results suggest that people are able to correctly process basic information about hurricane tracks but they do make some errors. More research is needed to understand the sources of these errors and to identify better methods of displaying uncertainty about hurricane parameters. © 2013 Society for Risk Analysis.

  8. 25 CFR 87.11 - Investment of judgment funds.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 25 Indians 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Investment of judgment funds. 87.11 Section 87.11 Indians... JUDGMENT FUNDS § 87.11 Investment of judgment funds. As soon as possible after the appropriation of... distribution of the funds, the Commissioner shall invest such funds pursuant to 25 U.S.C. 162a. Investments of...

  9. 25 CFR 11.501 - Judgments in civil actions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 25 Indians 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Judgments in civil actions. 11.501 Section 11.501 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Civil Actions § 11.501 Judgments in civil actions. (a) In all civil cases, judgment shall...

  10. Nonrational Processes in Ethical Decision Making

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rogerson, Mark D.; Gottlieb, Michael C.; Handelsman, Mitchell M.; Knapp, Samuel; Younggren, Jeffrey

    2011-01-01

    Most current ethical decision-making models provide a logical and reasoned process for making ethical judgments, but these models are empirically unproven and rely upon assumptions of rational, conscious, and quasi-legal reasoning. Such models predominate despite the fact that many nonrational factors influence ethical thought and behavior,…

  11. Consumer recycling: An ethical decision-making process

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Culiberg, Barbara; Bajde, Domen

    2013-01-01

    Although recycling is often experienced as a moral dilemma, studies that systematically approach this issue from an ethical perspective are scarce. Moreover, previous studies have explored recycling by mainly using single ethical constructs, such as moral norms, values or obligations, rarely...... approaching it as an ethical decision-making process. Our study takes a more holistic approach and integrates the recycling literature with business ethics theory in order to develop a conceptual model of ethical decision making involved in recycling. The model is based on Jones' issue-contingent model...... using structural equation modelling. The results of our study confirmed the relationships between three key facets of ethical decision making: moral recognition, moral judgment and moral intention. Higher levels of moral recognition were found to lead to more positive moral judgments, which in turn...

  12. Individual Differences in Numeracy and Cognitive Reflection, with Implications for Biases and Fallacies in Probability Judgment

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    J.M. Liberali (Jordana ); V.F. Reyna (Valerie ); S. Furlan (Sarah); L.M. Stein (Lilian ); S.T. Pardo (Seth )

    2012-01-01

    textabstractDespite evidence that individual differences in numeracy affect judgment and decision making, the precise mechanisms underlying how such differences produce biases and fallacies remain unclear. Numeracy scales have been developed without sufficient theoretical grounding, and their

  13. Individual Moral Judgment and Cultural Ideologies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Narvaez, Darcia; Getz, Irene; Rest, James R.; Thoma, Stephen J.

    1999-01-01

    Two studies examined how moral judgment and cultural ideology combine to predict moral thinking in members of a conservative church and a liberal church, and in a secular sample of university undergraduates. Found that a combination of religious ideology, political identity, and moral judgment predicted the church members' opinions on human-rights…

  14. Portraits made to measure: manipulating social judgments about individuals with a statistical face model.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Walker, Mirella; Vetter, Thomas

    2009-10-13

    The social judgments people make on the basis of the facial appearance of strangers strongly affect their behavior in different contexts. However, almost nothing is known about the physical information underlying these judgments. In this article, we present a new technology (a) to quantify the information in faces that is used for social judgments and (b) to manipulate the image of a human face in a way which is almost imperceptible but changes the personality traits ascribed to the depicted person. This method was developed in a high-dimensional face space by identifying vectors that capture maximum variability in judgments of personality traits. Our method of manipulating the salience of these vectors in faces was successfully transferred to novel photographs from an independent database. We evaluated this method by showing pairs of face photographs which differed only in the salience of one of six personality traits. Subjects were asked to decide which face was more extreme with respect to the trait in question. Results show that the image manipulation produced the intended attribution effect. All response accuracies were significantly above chance level. This approach to understanding and manipulating how a person is socially perceived could be useful in psychological research and could also be applied in advertising or the film industries.

  15. Building metamemorial knowledge over time: insights from eye tracking about the bases of feeling-of-knowing and confidence judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chua, Elizabeth F; Solinger, Lisa A

    2015-01-01

    Metamemory processes depend on different factors across the learning and memory time-scale. In the laboratory, subjects are often asked to make prospective feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments about target retrievability, or are asked to make retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs) about the retrieved target. We examined distinct and shared contributors to metamemory judgments, and how they were built over time. Eye movements were monitored during a face-scene associative memory task. At test, participants viewed a studied scene, then rated their FOK that they would remember the associated face. This was followed by a forced choice recognition test and RCJs. FOK judgments were less accurate than RCJ judgments, showing that the addition of mnemonic experience can increase metacognitive accuracy over time. However, there was also evidence that the given FOK rating influenced RCJs. Turning to eye movements, initial analyses showed that higher cue fluency was related to both higher FOKs and higher RCJs. However, further analyses revealed that the effects of the scene cue on RCJs were mediated by FOKs. Turning to the target, increased viewing time and faster viewing of the correct associate related to higher FOKs, consistent with the idea that target accessibility is a basis of FOKs. In contrast, the amount of viewing directed to the chosen face, regardless of whether it was correct, predicted higher RCJs, suggesting that choice experience is a significant contributor RCJs. We also examined covariates of the change in RCJ rating from the FOK rating, and showed that increased and faster viewing of the chosen face predicted raising one's confidence above one's FOK. Taken together these results suggest that metamemory judgments should not be thought of only as distinct subjective experiences, but complex processes that interact and evolve as new psychological bases for subjective experience become available.

  16. Judgments about Cooperators and Freeriders on a Shuar Work Team: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

    Science.gov (United States)

    Price, Michael E.

    2006-01-01

    Evolutionary biological theories of group cooperation predict that (1) group members will tend to judge cooperative co-members favorably, and freeriding co-members negatively and (2) members who themselves cooperate more frequently will be especially likely to make these social judgments. An experiment tested these predictions among Shuar…

  17. Counterfactual reasoning in surrogate decision making -- another look.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Johansson, Mats; Broström, Linus

    2011-06-01

    Incompetent patients need to have someone else make decisions on their behalf. According to the Substituted Judgment Standard the surrogate decision maker ought to make the decision that the patient would have made, had he or she been competent. Objections have been raised against this traditional construal of the standard on the grounds that it involves flawed counterfactual reasoning, and amendments have been suggested within the framework of possible worlds semantics. The paper shows that while this approach may circumvent the alleged problem, the way it has so far been elaborated reflects insufficient understanding of the moral underpinnings of the idea of substituted judgment. Proper recognition of these moral underpinnings has potentially far-reaching implications for our normative assumptions about accuracy and objectivity in surrogate decision making.

  18. Chinese Adolescents' Reasoning about Democratic and Authority-Based Decision Making in Peer, Family, and School Contexts.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Helwig, Charles C.; Arnold, Mary Louise; Tan, Dingliang; Boyd, Dwight

    2003-01-01

    This study explored judgments and reasoning of Chinese 13- to 18-year-olds regarding making decisions involving children in peer, family, and school contexts. Findings indicated that judgments and reasoning about decision-making varied by social context and by the decision under consideration. Evaluations of procedures became more differentiated…

  19. Multidimensional scaling of emotional responses to music in patients with temporal lobe resection.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dellacherie, D; Bigand, E; Molin, P; Baulac, M; Samson, S

    2011-10-01

    The present study investigated emotional responses to music by using multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis in patients with right or left medial temporal lobe (MTL) lesions and matched normal controls (NC). Participants were required to evaluate emotional dissimilarities of nine musical excerpts that were selected to express graduated changes along the valence and arousal dimensions. For this purpose, they rated dissimilarity between pairs of stimuli on an eight-point scale and the resulting matrices were submitted to an MDS analysis. The results showed that patients did not differ from NC participants in evaluating emotional feelings induced by the musical excerpts, suggesting that all participants were able to distinguish refined emotions. We concluded that the ability to detect and use emotional valence and arousal when making dissimilarity judgments was not strongly impaired by a right or left MTL lesion. This finding has important clinical implications and is discussed in light of current neuropsychological studies on emotion. It suggests that emotional responses to music can be at least partially preserved at a non-verbal level in patients with unilateral temporal lobe damage including the amygdala. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.

  20. Subclinical delusional ideation and appreciation of sample size and heterogeneity in statistical judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Galbraith, Niall D; Manktelow, Ken I; Morris, Neil G

    2010-11-01

    Previous studies demonstrate that people high in delusional ideation exhibit a data-gathering bias on inductive reasoning tasks. The current study set out to investigate the factors that may underpin such a bias by examining healthy individuals, classified as either high or low scorers on the Peters et al. Delusions Inventory (PDI). More specifically, whether high PDI scorers have a relatively poor appreciation of sample size and heterogeneity when making statistical judgments. In Expt 1, high PDI scorers made higher probability estimates when generalizing from a sample of 1 with regard to the heterogeneous human property of obesity. In Expt 2, this effect was replicated and was also observed in relation to the heterogeneous property of aggression. The findings suggest that delusion-prone individuals are less appreciative of the importance of sample size when making statistical judgments about heterogeneous properties; this may underpin the data gathering bias observed in previous studies. There was some support for the hypothesis that threatening material would exacerbate high PDI scorers' indifference to sample size.

  1. Wording effects in moral judgments

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ross E. O'Hara

    2010-12-01

    Full Text Available As the study of moral judgments grows, it becomes imperative to compare results across studies in order to create unified theories within the field. These efforts are potentially undermined, however, by variations in wording used by different researchers. The current study sought to determine whether, when, and how variations in wording influence moral judgments. Online participants responded to 15 different moral vignettes (e.g., the trolley problem using 1 of 4 adjectives: ``wrong'', ``inappropriate'', ``forbidden'', or ``blameworthy''. For half of the sample, these adjectives were preceded by the adverb ``morally''. Results indicated that people were more apt to judge an act as wrong or inappropriate than forbidden or blameworthy, and that disgusting acts were rated as more acceptable when ``morally'' was included. Although some wording differences emerged, effects sizes were small and suggest that studies of moral judgment with different wordings can legitimately be compared.

  2. Atypical moral judgment following traumatic brain injury

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Angelica Muresan

    2012-07-01

    Full Text Available Previous research has shown an association between emotions, particularly social emotions, and moral judgments. Some studies suggested an association between blunted emotion and the utilitarian moral judgments observed in patients with prefrontal lesions. In order to investigate how prefrontal brain damage affects moral judgment, we asked a sample of 29 TBI patients (12 females and 17 males and 41 healthy participants (16 females and 25 males to judge 22 hypothetical dilemmas split into three different categories (non-moral, impersonal and personal moral. The TBI group presented a higher proportion of affirmative (utilitarian responses for personal moral dilemmas when compared to controls, suggesting an atypical pattern of utilitarian judgements. We also found a negative association between the performance on recognition of social emotions and the proportion of affirmative responses on personal moral dilemmas. These results suggested that the preference for utilitarian responses in this type of dilemmas is accompanied by difficulties in social emotion recognition. Overall, our findings suggest that deontological moral judgments are associated with normal social emotion processing and that frontal lobe plays an important role in both emotion and moral judgment.

  3. From moral to legal judgment : the influence of normative context in lawyers and other academics

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Schleim, Stephan; Spranger, Tade M.; Erk, Susanne; Walter, Henrik

    Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral and legal decision-making. While we found activation of brain

  4. The Relationship of Critical-Thinking Skills and the Clinical-Judgment Skills of Baccalaureate Nursing Students.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bowles, Kathleen

    2000-01-01

    Nursing graduates (n=65) completed a critical thinking instrument and clinical decision-making scale. The critical thinking subscales of inference and inductive reasoning were positively correlated to clinical judgment. A significant relationship was found between critical thinking score and grade point average in nursing. (SK)

  5. The Multifold Relationship Between Memory and Decision Making: An Individual-differences Study

    Science.gov (United States)

    Del Missier, Fabio; Mäntylä, Timo; Hansson, Patrik; Bruine de Bruin, Wändi; Parker, Andrew M.; Nilsson, Lars-Göran

    2014-01-01

    Several judgment and decision-making tasks are assumed to involve memory functions, but significant knowledge gaps on the memory processes underlying these tasks remain. In a study on 568 adults between 25 to 80 years, hypotheses were tested on the specific relationships between individual differences in working memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory, respectively, and six main components of decision-making competence. In line with the hypotheses, working memory was positively related with the more cognitively-demanding tasks (Resistance to Framing, Applying Decision Rules, and Under/Overconfidence), whereas episodic memory was positively associated with a more experience-based judgment task (Recognizing Social Norms). Furthermore, semantic memory was positively related with two more knowledge-based decision-making tasks (Consistency in Risk Perception and Resistance to Sunk Costs). Finally, the age-related decline observed in some of the decision-making tasks was (partially or totally) mediated by the age-related decline in working memory or episodic memory. These findings are discussed in relation to the functional roles fulfilled by different memory processes in judgment and decision-making tasks. PMID:23565790

  6. The Influence of Emotional State and Pictorial Cues on Perceptual Judgments

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Kimberly R. Raddatz; Abigail Werth; Tuan Q. Tran

    2007-10-01

    Perspective displays (e.g., CDTI) are commonly used as decision aids in environments characterized by periods of high emotional arousal (e.g., terrain enhanced primary flight displays). However, little attention has been devoted to understanding how emotional state, independently or in conjunction with other perceptual factors (e.g., pictorial depth cues), can impact perceptual judgments. Preliminary research suggests that induced emotional state (positive or negative) adversely impacts size comparisons in perspective displays (Tran & Raddatz, 2006). This study further investigated how size comparisons are affected by emotional state and pictorial depth cues while attenuating the limitations of the Tran & Raddatz (2006) study. Results confirmed that observers do make slower judgments under induced emotional state. However, observers under negative emotional state showed higher sensitivity (d’) and required more evidence to respond that a size difference exists (response bias) than observers under positive emotional state. Implications for display design and human performance are discussed.

  7. Moral Emotions and Moral Judgments in Children's Narratives: Comparing Real-Life and Hypothetical Transgressions

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, Eveline; Gasser, Luciano; Malti, Tina

    2010-01-01

    How children make meaning of their own social experiences in situations involving moral issues is central to their subsequent affective and cognitive moral learning. Our study of young children's narratives describing their interpersonal conflicts shows that the emotions and judgments constructed in the course of these real-life narratives differ…

  8. Rational temporal predictions can underlie apparent failures to delay gratification

    Science.gov (United States)

    McGuire, Joseph T.; Kable, Joseph W.

    2013-01-01

    An important category of seemingly maladaptive decisions involves failure to postpone gratification. A person pursuing a desirable long-run outcome may abandon it in favor of a short-run alternative that has been available all along. Here we present a theoretical framework in which this seemingly irrational behavior emerges from stable preferences and veridical judgments. Our account recognizes that decision makers generally face uncertainty regarding the time at which future outcomes will materialize. When timing is uncertain, the value of persistence depends crucially on the nature of a decision-maker’s prior temporal beliefs. Certain forms of temporal beliefs imply that a delay’s predicted remaining length increases as a function of time already waited. In this type of situation, the rational, utility-maximizing strategy is to persist for a limited amount of time and then give up. We show empirically that people’s explicit predictions of remaining delay lengths indeed increase as a function of elapsed time in several relevant domains, implying that temporal judgments offer a rational basis for limiting persistence. We then develop our framework into a simple working model and show how it accounts for individual differences in a laboratory task (the well-known “marshmallow test”). We conclude that delay-of-gratification failure, generally viewed as a manifestation of limited self-control capacity, can instead arise as an adaptive response to the perceived statistics of one’s environment. PMID:23458085

  9. What defines 'enough' information? How policy workers make judgements and decisions during information seeking: preliminary results from an exploratory study

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    J.M. Berryman

    2006-01-01

    Full Text Available Introduction. Reports findings from research in progress investigating judgment and decision making during information seeking in the workplace, in particular, the assessment of enough information. Characteristics of this judgment and the role of context in shaping it are framed against theories of human judgment and decision making. Method. Thirty-three semi-structured interviews were conducted with public sector policy workers in Australia. Two interviews were carried out, the first with individual participants and the second, a joint interview with two participants. Interviews were taped and transcribed and inductive data analysis carried out. Findings. Findings discussed in this paper focus on contextual factors that frame policy workers' judgment and decision making while information seeking, factors including ill-structured problems, shifting goals, time stress and action-feedback loops. Also revealed was the importance of developing a framework, against which the judgment of enough information can be made, and the fluid and iterative nature of these judgments. Conclusion. The contextual factors reported show similarities with those identified by naturalistic decision making researchers, suggesting this new field of decision theory has much to offer researchers into information seeking in context.

  10. Medical Students’ Development of Ethical Judgment – Exploring the Learners’ Perspectives using a mixed methods approach

    Science.gov (United States)

    Langer, Thorsten; Jazmati, Danny; Jung, Ole; Schulz, Christian; Schnell, Martin W.

    2016-01-01

    Objective: Contemporary healthcare requires physicians to have well developed ethical judgment skills in addition to excellent clinical skills. However, no consensus has been reached on how to best teach ethical judgment skills during medical training. Previous studies revealed inconclusive results and applied varying theoretical frameworks. To date, the students’ perspectives on their development in ethical judgment has received less attention. Better insights in the learners’ experiences can help to improve educational interventions in medical ethics. Methods: A vignette featuring a challenging case with opposing views between a patient’s parents and a physician followed by a questionnaire was presented to a cohort of medical students at a German medical school at three points in time during their medical training (Year 1, 2 and 5). The questionnaire included closed and open-ended questions addressing the participant’s preferred, hypothetical actions, their reasoning as well as the resources informing their reasoning. Content analysis was used for qualitative data; frequencies and percentages were used to describe quantitative findings. Results: The response rate remained stable (28%) over the study period. Participants’ responses changed overtime. Accepting parents’ autonomy in the decision-making process was the majority standpoint of students in year 1 and 2 and became less often cited in year 5 (Year 1/2/5: 68/67/48%). On the contrary, not readily following the parents’ decision for medical reasons was a minority standpoint in year 1 and became more prevalent over time (year 1/2/5: 12/17/42%). Judgments were only partly based on ethics training. Instead, participants drew on experiences from their clinical clerkships and their personal lives. Throughout the study, participants did not feel well-prepared to make a judgment in the case (Average 2.7 on a Likert-Scale; 1=very well prepared, 4=very poor). Conclusions: Over the course of their medical

  11. Modeling Music Emotion Judgments Using Machine Learning Methods

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Naresh N. Vempala

    2018-01-01

    Full Text Available Emotion judgments and five channels of physiological data were obtained from 60 participants listening to 60 music excerpts. Various machine learning (ML methods were used to model the emotion judgments inclusive of neural networks, linear regression, and random forests. Input for models of perceived emotion consisted of audio features extracted from the music recordings. Input for models of felt emotion consisted of physiological features extracted from the physiological recordings. Models were trained and interpreted with consideration of the classic debate in music emotion between cognitivists and emotivists. Our models supported a hybrid position wherein emotion judgments were influenced by a combination of perceived and felt emotions. In comparing the different ML approaches that were used for modeling, we conclude that neural networks were optimal, yielding models that were flexible as well as interpretable. Inspection of a committee machine, encompassing an ensemble of networks, revealed that arousal judgments were predominantly influenced by felt emotion, whereas valence judgments were predominantly influenced by perceived emotion.

  12. 'To Think Representatively': Arendt on Judgment and the Imagination

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    ... the standpoint of the spectator, I go on to examine their most distinctive features, in particular, the link between judgment, the imagination, and the ability to think 'representatively'. I also examine the philosophical sources of Arendt's theory of judgment, namely, Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment and its criteria of validity.

  13. PREDICTORS OF ETHICAL JUDGMENTS IN THE ROMANIAN AUDIT PROFESSION: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alina Beattrice Vladu

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available This paper explores empirically six potential predictors of ethical judgments in the audit profession. Those potential predictors are assessed in the literature under the aegis of inconsistency in terms of their impact on ethical behaviour. In this paper, their impact was investigated using auditors as respondents. In this respect: age, gender, education, work experience, religiosity and deontological versus teleological evaluations were used to examine whether they have the potential to influence the ethical behaviour. The findings from the survey cannot conclusively indicate that all the items above influence the ethical behaviour of auditors. In this respect, education, work experience, deontological and teleological evaluations are found as predictors of ethical judgments. On the other side age, gender or religiosity are not found to be relevant in ethical decision making process. Further research is also approached.

  14. Pengaruh Gender dan Pengalaman Audit terhadap Audit Judgment

    OpenAIRE

    Erna Pasanda; Natalia Paranoan

    2013-01-01

    This study aims to examine the influence of gender and audit experience toward audit judgment and to examine gender and audit experience towards audit judgment when moderated by client credibility. The research was conducted on auditors who worked on KAP in Makassar South Sulawesi using survey. Sampling technique in this study was random sampling based on judgment. Data collected and then analyzed by employing regression method and Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA). The result indicates tha...

  15. Study on Accuracy of Judgments by Chinese Fingerprint Examiners

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Shiquan Liu

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available The interpretation of fingerprint evidence depends on the judgments of fingerprint examiners. This study assessed the accuracy of different judgments made by fingerprint examiners following the Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (ACE process. Each examiner was given five marks for analysis, comparison, and evaluation. We compared the experts′ judgments against the ground truth and used an annotation platform to evaluate how Chinese fingerprint examiners document their comparisons during the identification process. The results showed that different examiners demonstrated different accuracy of judgments and different mechanisms to reach them.

  16. Principal Holistic Judgments and High-Stakes Evaluations of Teachers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Briggs, Derek C.; Dadey, Nathan

    2017-01-01

    Results from a sample of 1,013 Georgia principals who rated 12,617 teachers are used to compare holistic and analytic principal judgments with indicators of student growth central to the state's teacher evaluation system. Holistic principal judgments were compared to mean student growth percentiles (MGPs) and analytic judgments from a formal…

  17. ERP correlates of social conformity in a line judgment task

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Chen Jing

    2012-05-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Previous research showed that individuals have a natural tendency to conform to others. This study investigated the temporal characteristics of neural processing involved in social conformity by recording participants’ brain potentials in performing a line judgment task. After making his initial choice, a participant was presented with the choices of four same-sex group members, which could be congruent or highly or moderately incongruent with the participant’s own choice. The participant was then immediately given a second opportunity to respond to the same stimulus. Results Participants were more likely to conform to the group members by changing their initial choices when these choices were in conflict with the group’s choices, and this behavioral adjustment occurred more often as the level of incongruence increased. Electrophysiologically, group choices that were incongruent with the participant’s choice elicited more negative-going medial frontal negativity (MFN, a component associated with processing expectancy violation, than those that were congruent with the participant’s choice, and the size of this effect increased as the level of incongruence increased. Moreover, at both levels of incongruence, the MFN responses were more negative-going for incongruent trials in which participants subsequently performed behavioral adjustment than for trials in which they stuck to their initial choices. Furthermore, over individual participants, participants who were more likely to conform to others (i.e., changing their initial choices exhibited stronger MFN effect than individuals who were more independent. Conclusions These findings suggest that incongruence with group choices or opinions can elicit brain responses that are similar to those elicited by violation of non-social expectancy in outcome evaluation and performance monitoring, and these brain signals are utilized in the following behavioral adjustment. The

  18. Scoring best-worst data in unbalanced many-item designs, with applications to crowdsourcing semantic judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hollis, Geoff

    2018-04-01

    Best-worst scaling is a judgment format in which participants are presented with a set of items and have to choose the superior and inferior items in the set. Best-worst scaling generates a large quantity of information per judgment because each judgment allows for inferences about the rank value of all unjudged items. This property of best-worst scaling makes it a promising judgment format for research in psychology and natural language processing concerned with estimating the semantic properties of tens of thousands of words. A variety of different scoring algorithms have been devised in the previous literature on best-worst scaling. However, due to problems of computational efficiency, these scoring algorithms cannot be applied efficiently to cases in which thousands of items need to be scored. New algorithms are presented here for converting responses from best-worst scaling into item scores for thousands of items (many-item scoring problems). These scoring algorithms are validated through simulation and empirical experiments, and considerations related to noise, the underlying distribution of true values, and trial design are identified that can affect the relative quality of the derived item scores. The newly introduced scoring algorithms consistently outperformed scoring algorithms used in the previous literature on scoring many-item best-worst data.

  19. Do physician outcome judgments and judgment biases contribute to inappropriate use of treatments? Study protocol

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Lott Alison

    2007-06-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background There are many examples of physicians using treatments inappropriately, despite clear evidence about the circumstances under which the benefits of such treatments outweigh their harms. When such over- or under- use of treatments occurs for common diseases, the burden to the healthcare system and risks to patients can be substantial. We propose that a major contributor to inappropriate treatment may be how clinicians judge the likelihood of important treatment outcomes, and how these judgments influence their treatment decisions. The current study will examine the role of judged outcome probabilities and other cognitive factors in the context of two clinical treatment decisions: 1 prescription of antibiotics for sore throat, where we hypothesize overestimation of benefit and underestimation of harm leads to over-prescription of antibiotics; and 2 initiation of anticoagulation for patients with atrial fibrillation (AF, where we hypothesize that underestimation of benefit and overestimation of harm leads to under-prescription of warfarin. Methods For each of the two conditions, we will administer surveys of two types (Type 1 and Type 2 to different samples of Canadian physicians. The primary goal of the Type 1 survey is to assess physicians' perceived outcome probabilities (both good and bad outcomes for the target treatment. Type 1 surveys will assess judged outcome probabilities in the context of a representative patient, and include questions about how physicians currently treat such cases, the recollection of rare or vivid outcomes, as well as practice and demographic details. The primary goal of the Type 2 surveys is to measure the specific factors that drive individual clinical judgments and treatment decisions, using a 'clinical judgment analysis' or 'lens modeling' approach. This survey will manipulate eight clinical variables across a series of sixteen realistic case vignettes. Based on the survey responses, we will be

  20. Verbal makes it positive, spatial makes it negative: working memory biases judgments, attention, and moods.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Storbeck, Justin; Watson, Philip

    2014-12-01

    Prior research has suggested that emotion and working memory domains are integrated, such that positive affect enhances verbal working memory, whereas negative affect enhances spatial working memory (Gray, 2004; Storbeck, 2012). Simon (1967) postulated that one feature of emotion and cognition integration would be reciprocal connectedness (i.e., emotion influences cognition and cognition influences emotion). We explored whether affective judgments and attention to affective qualities are biased by the activation of verbal and spatial working memory mind-sets. For all experiments, participants completed a 2-back verbal or spatial working memory task followed by an endorsement task (Experiments 1 & 2), word-pair selection task (Exp. 3), or attentional dot-probe task (Exp. 4). Participants who had an activated verbal, compared with spatial, working memory mind-set were more likely to endorse pictures (Exp. 1) and words (Exp. 2) as being more positive and to select the more positive word pair out of a set of word pairs that went 'together best' (Exp. 3). Additionally, people who completed the verbal working memory task took longer to disengage from positive stimuli, whereas those who completed the spatial working memory task took longer to disengage from negative stimuli (Exp. 4). Interestingly, across the 4 experiments, we observed higher levels of self-reported negative affect for people who completed the spatial working memory task, which was consistent with their endorsement and attentional bias toward negative stimuli. Therefore, emotion and working memory may have a reciprocal connectedness allowing for bidirectional influence.

  1. Training complex judgment: The effects of critical thinking and complex judgment

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Helsdingen, Anne; Van Gog, Tamara; Van Merriënboer, Jeroen

    2010-01-01

    Helsdingen, A. S., Van Gog, T., & Van Merrienboer, J. J. G. (2009). Training complex judgment: The effects of critical thinking and contextual interference. Paper presented at the International Center for Learning, Education and Performance Systems (ICLEPS). Talahassee, Florida: Florida State

  2. Adaptation to delayed auditory feedback induces the temporal recalibration effect in both speech perception and production.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yamamoto, Kosuke; Kawabata, Hideaki

    2014-12-01

    We ordinarily speak fluently, even though our perceptions of our own voices are disrupted by various environmental acoustic properties. The underlying mechanism of speech is supposed to monitor the temporal relationship between speech production and the perception of auditory feedback, as suggested by a reduction in speech fluency when the speaker is exposed to delayed auditory feedback (DAF). While many studies have reported that DAF influences speech motor processing, its relationship to the temporal tuning effect on multimodal integration, or temporal recalibration, remains unclear. We investigated whether the temporal aspects of both speech perception and production change due to adaptation to the delay between the motor sensation and the auditory feedback. This is a well-used method of inducing temporal recalibration. Participants continually read texts with specific DAF times in order to adapt to the delay. Then, they judged the simultaneity between the motor sensation and the vocal feedback. We measured the rates of speech with which participants read the texts in both the exposure and re-exposure phases. We found that exposure to DAF changed both the rate of speech and the simultaneity judgment, that is, participants' speech gained fluency. Although we also found that a delay of 200 ms appeared to be most effective in decreasing the rates of speech and shifting the distribution on the simultaneity judgment, there was no correlation between these measurements. These findings suggest that both speech motor production and multimodal perception are adaptive to temporal lag but are processed in distinct ways.

  3. Pupil dilation during recognition memory: Isolating unexpected recognition from judgment uncertainty.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mill, Ravi D; O'Connor, Akira R; Dobbins, Ian G

    2016-09-01

    Optimally discriminating familiar from novel stimuli demands a decision-making process informed by prior expectations. Here we demonstrate that pupillary dilation (PD) responses during recognition memory decisions are modulated by expectations, and more specifically, that pupil dilation increases for unexpected compared to expected recognition. Furthermore, multi-level modeling demonstrated that the time course of the dilation during each individual trial contains separable early and late dilation components, with the early amplitude capturing unexpected recognition, and the later trailing slope reflecting general judgment uncertainty or effort. This is the first demonstration that the early dilation response during recognition is dependent upon observer expectations and that separate recognition expectation and judgment uncertainty components are present in the dilation time course of every trial. The findings provide novel insights into adaptive memory-linked orienting mechanisms as well as the general cognitive underpinnings of the pupillary index of autonomic nervous system activity. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  4. The influence of group discussion on performance judgments: rating accuracy, contrast effects, and halo.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Palmer, Jerry K; Loveland, James M

    2008-03-01

    The authors investigated the effect of group discussion, such as may occur formally in panel interview scenarios, assessment centers, or 360-degree feedback situations, on judgments of performance. Research on group polarization suggests that the effect of group discussion combined with raters' preexisting impressions of ratees or interviewees should result in an extremitization of impressions. Thus, the authors hypothesized that group discussion would (a) make ratings less accurate, (b) polarize impressions that were already good or poor as reflected by greater contrast effects, and (c) increase positive halo. Results indicated that group discussion resulted in less accurate ratings and greater contrast effects. Additional analyses suggested that group discussion increased positive halo. The authors discuss implications for research on group or panel judgments.

  5. tDCS Over DLPFC Leads to Less Utilitarian Response in Moral-Personal Judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zheng, Haoli; Lu, Xinbo; Huang, Daqiang

    2018-01-01

    The profound nature of moral judgment has been discussed and debated for centuries. When facing the trade-off between pursuing moral rights and seeking better consequences, most people make different moral choices between two kinds of dilemmas. Such differences were explained by the dual-process theory involving an automatic emotional response and a controlled application of utilitarian decision-rules. In neurocognitive studies, the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been demonstrated to play an important role in cognitive "rational" control processes in moral dilemmas. However, the profile of results across studies is not entirely consistent. Although one transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study revealed that disrupting the right DLPFC led to less utilitarian responses, other TMS studies indicated that inhibition of the right DLPFC led to more utilitarian choices. Moreover, the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is essential for its function of integrating belief and intention in moral judgment, which is related to the emotional process according to the dual-process theory. Relatively few studies have reported the causal relationship between TPJ and participants' moral responses, especially in moral dilemmas. In the present study, we aimed to demonstrate a direct link between the neural and behavioral results by application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in the bilateral DLPFC or TPJ of our participants. We observed that activating the right DLPFC as well as inhibiting the left DLPFC led to less utilitarian judgments, especially in moral-personal conditions, indicating that the right DLPFC plays an essential role, not only through its function of moral reasoning but also through its information integrating process in moral judgments. It was also revealed that altering the excitability of the bilateral TPJ using tDCS negligibly altered the moral response in non-moral, moral-impersonal and moral-personal dilemmas

  6. tDCS Over DLPFC Leads to Less Utilitarian Response in Moral-Personal Judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Haoli Zheng

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available The profound nature of moral judgment has been discussed and debated for centuries. When facing the trade-off between pursuing moral rights and seeking better consequences, most people make different moral choices between two kinds of dilemmas. Such differences were explained by the dual-process theory involving an automatic emotional response and a controlled application of utilitarian decision-rules. In neurocognitive studies, the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC has been demonstrated to play an important role in cognitive “rational” control processes in moral dilemmas. However, the profile of results across studies is not entirely consistent. Although one transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS study revealed that disrupting the right DLPFC led to less utilitarian responses, other TMS studies indicated that inhibition of the right DLPFC led to more utilitarian choices. Moreover, the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ is essential for its function of integrating belief and intention in moral judgment, which is related to the emotional process according to the dual-process theory. Relatively few studies have reported the causal relationship between TPJ and participants' moral responses, especially in moral dilemmas. In the present study, we aimed to demonstrate a direct link between the neural and behavioral results by application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS in the bilateral DLPFC or TPJ of our participants. We observed that activating the right DLPFC as well as inhibiting the left DLPFC led to less utilitarian judgments, especially in moral-personal conditions, indicating that the right DLPFC plays an essential role, not only through its function of moral reasoning but also through its information integrating process in moral judgments. It was also revealed that altering the excitability of the bilateral TPJ using tDCS negligibly altered the moral response in non-moral, moral-impersonal and moral

  7. Encoding, storage and judgment of experienced frequency and duration

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Tilmann Betsch

    2010-08-01

    Full Text Available This paper examines conditions that do or do not lead to accurate judgments of frequency (JOF and judgments of duration (JOD. In three experiments, duration and frequency of visually presented stimuli are varied orthogonally in a within-subjects design. Experiment 1 reveals an asymmetric judgment pattern. JOFs reflected actual presentation frequency quite accurately and were unbiased by exposure duration. Conversely, JODs were almost insensitive to actual exposure duration and were systematically biased by presentation frequency. We show, however, that a tendency towards a symmetric judgment pattern can be obtained by manipulating encoding conditions. Sustaining attention during encoding (Experiment 2 or enhancing richness of the encoded stimuli (Experiment 3 increases judgment sensitivity in JOD and yields biases in both directions (JOF biased by exposure duration, JOD biased by presentation frequency. The implications of these findings for underlying memory mechanisms are discussed.

  8. First impressions: making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Willis, Janine; Todorov, Alexander

    2006-07-01

    People often draw trait inferences from the facial appearance of other people. We investigated the minimal conditions under which people make such inferences. In five experiments, each focusing on a specific trait judgment, we manipulated the exposure time of unfamiliar faces. Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for participants to form an impression. In fact, for all judgments-attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness-increased exposure time did not significantly increase the correlations. When exposure time increased from 100 to 500 ms, participants' judgments became more negative, response times for judgments decreased, and confidence in judgments increased. When exposure time increased from 500 to 1,000 ms, trait judgments and response times did not change significantly (with one exception), but confidence increased for some of the judgments; this result suggests that additional time may simply boost confidence in judgments. However, increased exposure time led to more differentiated person impressions.

  9. A dynamic neural field model of temporal order judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hecht, Lauren N; Spencer, John P; Vecera, Shaun P

    2015-12-01

    Temporal ordering of events is biased, or influenced, by perceptual organization-figure-ground organization-and by spatial attention. For example, within a region assigned figural status or at an attended location, onset events are processed earlier (Lester, Hecht, & Vecera, 2009; Shore, Spence, & Klein, 2001), and offset events are processed for longer durations (Hecht & Vecera, 2011; Rolke, Ulrich, & Bausenhart, 2006). Here, we present an extension of a dynamic field model of change detection (Johnson, Spencer, Luck, & Schöner, 2009; Johnson, Spencer, & Schöner, 2009) that accounts for both the onset and offset performance for figural and attended regions. The model posits that neural populations processing the figure are more active, resulting in a peak of activation that quickly builds toward a detection threshold when the onset of a target is presented. This same enhanced activation for some neural populations is maintained when a present target is removed, creating delays in the perception of the target's offset. We discuss the broader implications of this model, including insights regarding how neural activation can be generated in response to the disappearance of information. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

  10. Inductive reasoning and judgment interference: experiments on Simpson's paradox.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fiedler, Klaus; Walther, Eva; Freytag, Peter; Nickel, Stefanie

    2003-01-01

    In a series of experiments on inductive reasoning, participants assessed the relationship between gender, success, and a covariate in a situation akin to Simpson's paradox: Although women were less successful then men according to overall statistics, they actually fared better then men at either of two universities. Understanding trivariate relationships of this kind requires cognitive routines similar to analysis of covariance. Across the first five experiments, however, participants generalized the disadvantage of women at the aggregate level to judgments referring to the different levels of the covariate, even when motivation was high and appropriate mental models were activated. The remaining three experiments demonstrated that Simpson's paradox could be mastered when the salience of the covariate was increased and when the salience of gender was decreased by the inclusion of temporal cues that disambiguate the causal status of the covariate. Copyright 2003 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

  11. Ethical Judgments and Behaviors: Applying a Multidimensional Ethics Scale to Measuring ICT Ethics of College Students

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jung, Insung

    2009-01-01

    Assuming that ICT ethics are influenced by both moral and circumstantial factors, the study investigates Japanese college students' ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in three scenarios involving ICT-related ethical problems and explores why they make such decisions, relying on five moral philosophies: moral equity, relativism,…

  12. Diminished caudate and superior temporal gyrus responses to effort-based decision making in patients with first-episode major depressive disorder.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yang, Xin-hua; Huang, Jia; Lan, Yong; Zhu, Cui-ying; Liu, Xiao-qun; Wang, Ye-fei; Cheung, Eric F C; Xie, Guang-rong; Chan, Raymond C K

    2016-01-04

    Anhedonia, the loss of interest or pleasure in reward processing, is a hallmark feature of major depressive disorder (MDD), but its underlying neurobiological mechanism is largely unknown. The present study aimed to examine the underlying neural mechanism of reward-related decision-making in patients with MDD. We examined behavioral and neural responses to rewards in patients with first-episode MDD (N=25) and healthy controls (N=25) using the Effort-Expenditure for Rewards Task (EEfRT). The task involved choices about possible rewards of varying magnitude and probability. We tested the hypothesis that individuals with MDD would exhibit a reduced neural response in reward-related brain structures involved in cost-benefit decision-making. Compared with healthy controls, patients with MDD showed significantly weaker responses in the left caudate nucleus when contrasting the 'high reward'-'low reward' condition, and blunted responses in the left superior temporal gyrus and the right caudate nucleus when contrasting high and low probabilities. In addition, hard tasks chosen during high probability trials were negatively correlated with superior temporal gyrus activity in MDD patients, while the same choices were negatively correlated with caudate nucleus activity in healthy controls. These results indicate that reduced caudate nucleus and superior temporal gyrus activation may underpin abnormal cost-benefit decision-making in MDD. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  13. The Influence of Effortful Thought and Cognitive Proficiencies on the Conjunction Fallacy: Implications for Dual-Process Theories of Reasoning and Judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Scherer, Laura D; Yates, J Frank; Baker, S Glenn; Valentine, Kathrene D

    2017-06-01

    Human judgment often violates normative standards, and virtually no judgment error has received as much attention as the conjunction fallacy. Judgment errors have historically served as evidence for dual-process theories of reasoning, insofar as these errors are assumed to arise from reliance on a fast and intuitive mental process, and are corrected via effortful deliberative reasoning. In the present research, three experiments tested the notion that conjunction errors are reduced by effortful thought. Predictions based on three different dual-process theory perspectives were tested: lax monitoring, override failure, and the Tripartite Model. Results indicated that participants higher in numeracy were less likely to make conjunction errors, but this association only emerged when participants engaged in two-sided reasoning, as opposed to one-sided or no reasoning. Confidence was higher for incorrect as opposed to correct judgments, suggesting that participants were unaware of their errors.

  14. fMRI evidence for a dual process account of the speed-accuracy tradeoff in decision-making.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jason Ivanoff

    Full Text Available BACKGROUND: The speed and accuracy of decision-making have a well-known trading relationship: hasty decisions are more prone to errors while careful, accurate judgments take more time. Despite the pervasiveness of this speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT in decision-making, its neural basis is still unknown. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI we show that emphasizing the speed of a perceptual decision at the expense of its accuracy lowers the amount of evidence-related activity in lateral prefrontal cortex. Moreover, this speed-accuracy difference in lateral prefrontal cortex activity correlates with the speed-accuracy difference in the decision criterion metric of signal detection theory. We also show that the same instructions increase baseline activity in a dorso-medial cortical area involved in the internal generation of actions. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These findings suggest that the SAT is neurally implemented by modulating not only the amount of externally-derived sensory evidence used to make a decision, but also the internal urge to make a response. We propose that these processes combine to control the temporal dynamics of the speed-accuracy trade-off in decision-making.

  15. Confidence-Accuracy Calibration in Absolute and Relative Face Recognition Judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Weber, Nathan; Brewer, Neil

    2004-01-01

    Confidence-accuracy (CA) calibration was examined for absolute and relative face recognition judgments as well as for recognition judgments from groups of stimuli presented simultaneously or sequentially (i.e., simultaneous or sequential mini-lineups). When the effect of difficulty was controlled, absolute and relative judgments produced…

  16. Musical Scales in Tone Sequences Improve Temporal Accuracy.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Min S; Di Luca, Massimiliano

    2018-01-01

    Predicting the time of stimulus onset is a key component in perception. Previous investigations of perceived timing have focused on the effect of stimulus properties such as rhythm and temporal irregularity, but the influence of non-temporal properties and their role in predicting stimulus timing has not been exhaustively considered. The present study aims to understand how a non-temporal pattern in a sequence of regularly timed stimuli could improve or bias the detection of temporal deviations. We presented interspersed sequences of 3, 4, 5, and 6 auditory tones where only the timing of the last stimulus could slightly deviate from isochrony. Participants reported whether the last tone was 'earlier' or 'later' relative to the expected regular timing. In two conditions, the tones composing the sequence were either organized into musical scales or they were random tones. In one experiment, all sequences ended with the same tone; in the other experiment, each sequence ended with a different tone. Results indicate higher discriminability of anisochrony with musical scales and with longer sequences, irrespective of the knowledge of the final tone. Such an outcome suggests that the predictability of non-temporal properties, as enabled by the musical scale pattern, can be a factor in determining the sensitivity of time judgments.

  17. Aging and Confidence Judgments in Item Recognition

    Science.gov (United States)

    Voskuilen, Chelsea; Ratcliff, Roger; McKoon, Gail

    2018-01-01

    We examined the effects of aging on performance in an item-recognition experiment with confidence judgments. A model for confidence judgments and response time (RTs; Ratcliff & Starns, 2013) was used to fit a large amount of data from a new sample of older adults and a previously reported sample of younger adults. This model of confidence…

  18. Training complex judgment: the effects of critical thinking and complex judgment

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Helsdingen, Anne; Van Gog, Tamara; Van Merriënboer, Jeroen; Van den Bosch, Karel

    2010-01-01

    Helsdingen, A. S., Van Gog, T., Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Van den Bosch, K. (2009). Training complex judgment: the effects of critical thinking and contextual interference. Poster presented at the international conference on cognitive load theory. March, 2-4, 2009, Heerlen, The Netherlands.

  19. Introduction to the special issue: Intuition and affect in risk perception and decision making

    OpenAIRE

    Gisela Boehm; Wibecke Brun

    2008-01-01

    (from the introduction) Intuition and affect have been neglected topics in the literature on human judgment and decision making for a long time. Judgmental processes involved in risk perception and decision making have traditionally been conceptualized as cognitive in nature, being based upon a rational and deliberate evaluation of the alternatives at hand. This picture started to change in the early 1980s when decision researchers looked beyond rational, deliberate, and cognitive processes a...

  20. The tacit dimension of clinical judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Goldman, G. M.

    1990-01-01

    Two distinct views of the nature of clinical judgment are identified and contrasted. The dominant view that clinical judgment is a fully explicit process is compared to the relatively neglected view that tacit knowledge plays a substantial role in the clinician's mental operations. The tacit dimension of medical thinking is explored at length. The discussion suggests severe limits when applying decision analysis, expert systems, and computer-aided cost-benefit review to medicine. The goals and practices of postgraduate medical education are also examined from this perspective, as are various other implications for the clinician. The paper concludes that it is valuable to explore the nature of medical thinking in order to improve clinical practice and education. Such explorations should, however, take cognizance of the often overlooked tacit dimension of clinical judgment. Possible constraints on the medical applicability of both formal expert systems and heavily didactic instructional programs are considered. PMID:2356625

  1. What does your profile picture say about you?:the accuracy of thin-slice personality judgments from social networking sites made at zero-acquaintance

    OpenAIRE

    Turner, Mark; Hunt, Natalie

    2014-01-01

    The study investigates impressions formed through social networking sites, specifically the initial judgments we make of others when first momentarily exposed to their photograph. The personality characteristics of 52 Female Facebook profile owners were evaluated by a group of raters who briefly viewed the current profile picture of each person. Analysis revealed consensus between raters when judging personality attributes, although self-other agreement was low: raters' judgments correlated w...

  2. How Do Different Ways of Measuring Individual Differences in Zero-Acquaintance Personality Judgment Accuracy Correlate With Each Other?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hall, Judith A; Back, Mitja D; Nestler, Steffen; Frauendorfer, Denise; Schmid Mast, Marianne; Ruben, Mollie A

    2018-04-01

    This research compares two different approaches that are commonly used to measure accuracy of personality judgment: the trait accuracy approach wherein participants discriminate among targets on a given trait, thus making intertarget comparisons, and the profile accuracy approach wherein participants discriminate between traits for a given target, thus making intratarget comparisons. We examined correlations between these methods as well as correlations among accuracies for judging specific traits. The present article documents relations among these approaches based on meta-analysis of five studies of zero-acquaintance impressions of the Big Five traits. Trait accuracies correlated only weakly with overall and normative profile accuracy. Substantial convergence between the trait and profile accuracy methods was only found when an aggregate of all five trait accuracies was correlated with distinctive profile accuracy. Importantly, however, correlations between the trait and profile accuracy approaches were reduced to negligibility when statistical overlap was corrected by removing the respective trait from the profile correlations. Moreover, correlations of the separate trait accuracies with each other were very weak. Different ways of measuring individual differences in personality judgment accuracy are not conceptually and empirically the same, but rather represent distinct abilities that rely on different judgment processes. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  3. Training complex judgment: the effects of critical thinking and complex judgment

    OpenAIRE

    Helsdingen, Anne; Van Gog, Tamara; Van Merriënboer, Jeroen; Van den Bosch, Karel

    2010-01-01

    Helsdingen, A. S., Van Gog, T., Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Van den Bosch, K. (2009). Training complex judgment: the effects of critical thinking and contextual interference. Poster presented at the international conference on cognitive load theory. March, 2-4, 2009, Heerlen, The Netherlands. [Poster presentation

  4. Memory Processes in Frequency Judgment: The impact of pre-experimental frequencies and co-occurrences on frequency estimates.

    OpenAIRE

    Renkewitz, Frank

    2004-01-01

    Contemporary theories on frequency processing have been developed in different sub-disciplines of psychology and have shown remarkable discrepancies. Thus, in judgment and decision making, frequency estimates on serially encoded events are mostly traced back to the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Evidence for the use of this heuristic comes from several popular demonstrations of biased frequency estimates. In the area of decision making, these demonstrations led to the ...

  5. 28 CFR 51.10 - Requirement of action for declaratory judgment or submission to the Attorney General.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... judgment or submission to the Attorney General. 51.10 Section 51.10 Judicial Administration DEPARTMENT OF... Attorney General. Section 5 requires that, prior to enforcement of any change affecting voting, the... will not be the effect of the change or (b) Make to the Attorney General a proper submission of the...

  6. Moral Judgment Reloaded: A Moral Dilemma validation study

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Julia F. Christensen

    2014-07-01

    Full Text Available We propose a revised set of moral dilemmas for studies on moral judgment. We selected a total of 46 moral dilemmas available in the literature and fine-tuned them in terms of four conceptual factors (Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, Evitability and Intention and methodological aspects of the dilemma formulation (word count, expression style, question formats that have been shown to influence moral judgment. Second, we obtained normative codings of arousal and valence for each dilemma showing that emotional arousal in response to moral dilemmas depends crucially on the factors Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, and Intentionality. Third, we validated the dilemma set confirming that people's moral judgment is sensitive to all four conceptual factors, and to their interactions. Results are discussed in the context of this field of research, outlining also the relevance of our RT effects for the Dual Process account of moral judgment. Finally, we suggest tentative theoretical avenues for future testing, particularly stressing the importance of the factor Intentionality in moral judgment. Additionally, due to the importance of cross-cultural studies in the quest for universals in human moral cognition, we provide the new set dilemmas in six languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan and Danish. The norming values provided here refer to the Spanish dilemma set.

  7. Moral judgment reloaded: a moral dilemma validation study

    Science.gov (United States)

    Christensen, Julia F.; Flexas, Albert; Calabrese, Margareta; Gut, Nadine K.; Gomila, Antoni

    2014-01-01

    We propose a revised set of moral dilemmas for studies on moral judgment. We selected a total of 46 moral dilemmas available in the literature and fine-tuned them in terms of four conceptual factors (Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, Evitability, and Intention) and methodological aspects of the dilemma formulation (word count, expression style, question formats) that have been shown to influence moral judgment. Second, we obtained normative codings of arousal and valence for each dilemma showing that emotional arousal in response to moral dilemmas depends crucially on the factors Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, and Intentionality. Third, we validated the dilemma set confirming that people's moral judgment is sensitive to all four conceptual factors, and to their interactions. Results are discussed in the context of this field of research, outlining also the relevance of our RT effects for the Dual Process account of moral judgment. Finally, we suggest tentative theoretical avenues for future testing, particularly stressing the importance of the factor Intentionality in moral judgment. Additionally, due to the importance of cross-cultural studies in the quest for universals in human moral cognition, we provide the new set dilemmas in six languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, and Danish). The norming values provided here refer to the Spanish dilemma set. PMID:25071621

  8. Low levels of empathic concern predict utilitarian moral judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel; Young, Liane

    2013-01-01

    Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Classic moral dilemmas are often defined by the conflict between a putatively rational response to maximize aggregate welfare (i.e., the utilitarian judgment) and an emotional aversion to harm (i.e., the non-utilitarian judgment). Here, we address two questions. First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarians or enhanced in non-utilitarians? The results reveal a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular (i.e., feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress). Utilitarian participants showed significantly reduced empathic concern on an independent empathy measure. These findings therefore reveal diminished empathic concern in utilitarian moral judges.

  9. Utilitarian Moral Judgment Exclusively Coheres with Inference from Is to Ought.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Elqayam, Shira; Wilkinson, Meredith R; Thompson, Valerie A; Over, David E; Evans, Jonathan St B T

    2017-01-01

    Faced with moral choice, people either judge according to pre-existing obligations ( deontological judgment), or by taking into account the consequences of their actions ( utilitarian judgment). We propose that the latter coheres with a more general cognitive mechanism - deontic introduction , the tendency to infer normative ('deontic') conclusions from descriptive premises (is-ought inference). Participants were presented with vignettes that allowed either deontological or utilitarian choice, and asked to draw a range of deontic conclusions, as well as judge the overall moral rightness of each choice separately. We predicted and found a selective defeasibility pattern, in which manipulations that suppressed deontic introduction also suppressed utilitarian moral judgment, but had little effect on deontological moral judgment. Thus, deontic introduction coheres with utilitarian moral judgment almost exclusively. We suggest a family of norm-generating informal inferences, in which normative conclusions are drawn from descriptive (although value-laden) premises. This family includes deontic introduction and utilitarian moral judgment as well as other informal inferences. We conclude with a call for greater integration of research in moral judgment and research into deontic reasoning and informal inference.

  10. Futility and the varieties of medical judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sulmasy, D P

    1997-01-01

    Pellegrino has argued that end-of-life decisions should be based upon the physician's assessment of the effectiveness of the treatment and the patient's assessment of its benefits and burdens. This would seem to imply that conditions for medical futility could be met either if there were a judgment of ineffectiveness, or if the patient were in a state in which he or she were incapable of a subjective judgment of the benefits and burdens of the treatment. I argue that a theory of futility according to Pellegrino would deny that latter but would permit some cases of the former. I call this the "circumspect" view. I show that Pellegrino would adopt the circumspect view because he would see the medical futility debate in the context of a system of medical ethics based firmly upon a philosophy of medicine. The circumspect view is challenged by those who would deny that one can distinguish objective from subjective medical judgments. I defend the circumspect view on the basis of a previously neglected aspect of the philosophy of medicine-an examination of varieties of medical judgment. I then offer some practical applications of this theory in clinical practice.

  11. Accounting for Occurrences: A New View of the Use of Contingency Information in Causal Judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    White, Peter A.

    2008-01-01

    When people make causal judgments from contingency information, a principal aim is to account for occurrences of the outcome. When 2 causes are under consideration, the capacity of either to account for occurrences is judged from how likely the cause is to be present when the outcome occurs and from the rate at which the outcome occurs when that…

  12. Similar Task Features Shape Judgment and Categorization Processes

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hoffmann, Janina A.; von Helversen, Bettina; Rieskamp, Jörg

    2016-01-01

    The distinction between similarity-based and rule-based strategies has instigated a large body of research in categorization and judgment. Within both domains, the task characteristics guiding strategy shifts are increasingly well documented. Across domains, past research has observed shifts from rule-based strategies in judgment to…

  13. Peripheral Visual Cues: Their Fate in Processing and Effects on Attention and Temporal-Order Perception.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tünnermann, Jan; Scharlau, Ingrid

    2016-01-01

    Peripheral visual cues lead to large shifts in psychometric distributions of temporal-order judgments. In one view, such shifts are attributed to attention speeding up processing of the cued stimulus, so-called prior entry. However, sometimes these shifts are so large that it is unlikely that they are caused by attention alone. Here we tested the prevalent alternative explanation that the cue is sometimes confused with the target on a perceptual level, bolstering the shift of the psychometric function. We applied a novel model of cued temporal-order judgments, derived from Bundesen's Theory of Visual Attention. We found that cue-target confusions indeed contribute to shifting psychometric functions. However, cue-induced changes in the processing rates of the target stimuli play an important role, too. At smaller cueing intervals, the cue increased the processing speed of the target. At larger intervals, inhibition of return was predominant. Earlier studies of cued TOJs were insensitive to these effects because in psychometric distributions they are concealed by the conjoint effects of cue-target confusions and processing rate changes.

  14. Ethical Ideology and Ethical Judgments of Accounting Practitioners in Malaysia

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    Suhaiza Ismail

    2011-09-01

    Full Text Available The paper intends to explore the ethical ideology and ethical judgments of accounting practitioners in Malaysia. The objectives of this study are twofold. First, the paper intends to examine the factors that contribute to the different ethical ideology among Malaysian accounting practitioners. Second, it aims to investigate the influence of demographic factors and ethical ideology on ethical judgments of accounting practitioners. The study used Forsyth’s (1980 Ethics Position Questionnaire instrument to examine the ethical ideology of the accountants and adopted ethics vignettes used by Emerson et al. (2007 to assess the ethical judgments of the respondents. From the statistical analysis, this study found that age and gender have a significant impact on ethical judgment but not on ethical ideology. In addition, idealism and relativism have a significant influence on ethical judgment, especially in a legally unethical situation.

  15. Can we use human judgments to determine the discount rate?

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    Baron, J

    2000-12-01

    It has been suggested that the long-term discount rate for environmental goods should decrease at longer delays. One justification for this suggestion is that human judgments support it. This article presents an experiment showing that judgments concerning discount rates are internally inconsistent. These results point to potential problems with the use of judgments referenda for determining discount rates in cost-benefit analyses.

  16. Love as a regulative ideal in surrogate decision making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stonestreet, Erica Lucast

    2014-10-01

    This discussion aims to give a normative theoretical basis for a "best judgment" model of surrogate decision making rooted in a regulative ideal of love. Currently, there are two basic models of surrogate decision making for incompetent patients: the "substituted judgment" model and the "best interests" model. The former draws on the value of autonomy and responds with respect; the latter draws on the value of welfare and responds with beneficence. It can be difficult to determine which of these two models is more appropriate for a given patient, and both approaches may seem inadequate for a surrogate who loves the patient. The proposed "best judgment" model effectively draws on the values incorporated in each of the traditional standards, but does so because these values are important to someone who loves a patient, since love responds to the patient as the specific person she is. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  17. Unawareness of Self-interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others’ Behavior

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    Bocian Konrad

    2014-12-01

    Full Text Available Previous studies (Bocian & Wojciszke, 2014 showed that self-interest biases moral perception of others’ unethical actions. Moreover, affective changes in attitudinal responses towards the perpetrator of an immoral act drives the bias. In the present studies, we attempted to answer the question whether people are aware of the self-interest bias in their judgments of others’ behavior. We conducted two experiments showing that moral judgments of verbally described and imagined actions were dominated by norms rather than self-interest (Study 1 and that people were not aware that self-interest distorted their moral judgment (Study 2. The unawareness of the self-interest bias among the participants was attributable to omission of their own emotional responses when forecasting their moral judgments. We discuss the importance of emotions presence in studies on moral judgments as well as contribution of the present research to the intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

  18. The use of experts and their judgments in nursing research: an overview

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    JC Bruce

    2008-09-01

    Full Text Available Experts and their judgments are widely used in the fields of research, education, health care, law, commerce and technology. Expert judgment is known for its subjectivity and its potential for bias, which brings into question the accuracy and authenticity of judgmental data. At the same time there is acknowledgment of the valued contribution of judgmental data towards valid inferences in research and education. Maximizing the use of experts and their judgments has therefore become an endeavour of educationists and researchers alike.

  19. FOREIGN JUDGMENTS PROJECT OF HAGUE CONFERENCE: FOR A GLOBAL REGIME OF INTERNATIONAL CIRCULATION OF JUDGMENTS ON CIVIL AND COMMERCIAL SUBJECTS

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    Nadia de Araujo

    2017-02-01

    Full Text Available The Hague Conference on Private International Law is promoting the adoption of rules designed to circumvent usual obstacles to the international circulation of judgments. The Judgments Project initiated in the nineties aims at mitigating uncertainties and risks associated with the international commerce by setting forth a simple and safe system according to which foreign judgments may circulate from country to country. The purpose of this article is to preserve the historical moment of the negotiations taking place at the Hague, as well as to pinpoint some technical issues raised in the course of the project that may be of general interest to those involved in the subject of international jurisdiction.

  20. Cold or calculating? Reduced activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex reflects decreased emotional aversion to harming in counterintuitive utilitarian judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wiech, Katja; Kahane, Guy; Shackel, Nicholas; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian; Tracey, Irene

    2013-01-01

    Recent research on moral decision-making has suggested that many common moral judgments are based on immediate intuitions. However, some individuals arrive at highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions about when it is permissible to harm other individuals. Such utilitarian judgments have been attributed to effortful reasoning that has overcome our natural emotional aversion to harming others. Recent studies, however, suggest that such utilitarian judgments might also result from a decreased aversion to harming others, due to a deficit in empathic concern and social emotion. The present study investigated the neural basis of such indifference to harming using functional neuroimaging during engagement in moral dilemmas. A tendency to counterintuitive utilitarian judgment was associated both with ‘psychoticism’, a trait associated with a lack of empathic concern and antisocial tendencies, and with ‘need for cognition’, a trait reflecting preference for effortful cognition. Importantly, only psychoticism was also negatively correlated with activation in the subgenual cingulate cortex (SCC), a brain area implicated in empathic concern and social emotions such as guilt, during counterintuitive utilitarian judgments. Our findings suggest that when individuals reach highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions, this need not reflect greater engagement in explicit moral deliberation. It may rather reflect a lack of empathic concern, and diminished aversion to harming others. PMID:23280149

  1. Attention modulations on the perception of social hierarchy at distinct temporal stages: an electrophysiological investigation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Feng, Chunliang; Tian, Tengxiang; Feng, Xue; Luo, Yue-Jia

    2015-04-01

    Recent behavioral and neuroscientific studies have revealed the preferential processing of superior-hierarchy cues. However, it remains poorly understood whether top-down controlled mechanisms modulate temporal dynamics of neurocognitive substrates underlying the preferential processing of these biologically and socially relevant cues. This was investigated in the current study by recording event-related potentials from participants who were presented with superior or inferior social hierarchy. Participants performed a hierarchy-judgment task that required attention to hierarchy cues or a gender-judgment task that withdrew their attention from these cues. Superior-hierarchy cues evoked stronger neural responses than inferior-hierarchy cues at both early (N170/N200) and late (late positive potential, LPP) temporal stages. Notably, the modulations of top-down attention were identified on the LPP component, such that superior-hierarchy cues evoked larger LPP amplitudes than inferior-hierarchy cues only in the attended condition; whereas the modulations of the N170/N200 component by hierarchy cues were evident in both attended and unattended conditions. These findings suggest that the preferential perception of superior-hierarchy cues involves both relatively automatic attentional bias at the early temporal stage as well as flexible and voluntary cognitive evaluation at the late temporal stage. Finally, these hierarchy-related effects were absent when participants were shown the same stimuli which, however, were not associated with social-hierarchy information in a non-hierarchy task (Experiment 2), suggesting that effects of social hierarchy at early and late temporal stages could not be accounted for by differences in physical attributes between these social cues. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  2. Low levels of empathic concern predict utilitarian moral judgment.

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    Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht

    Full Text Available Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Classic moral dilemmas are often defined by the conflict between a putatively rational response to maximize aggregate welfare (i.e., the utilitarian judgment and an emotional aversion to harm (i.e., the non-utilitarian judgment. Here, we address two questions. First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarians or enhanced in non-utilitarians? The results reveal a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular (i.e., feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress. Utilitarian participants showed significantly reduced empathic concern on an independent empathy measure. These findings therefore reveal diminished empathic concern in utilitarian moral judges.

  3. Ignorance Is No Excuse: Moral Judgments Are Influenced by a Genetic Variation on the Oxytocin Receptor Gene

    Science.gov (United States)

    Walter, Nora T.; Montag, Christian; Markett, Sebastian; Felten, Andrea; Voigt, Gesine; Reuter, Martin

    2012-01-01

    Perspective-taking has become a main focus of studies on moral judgments. Recent fMRI studies have demonstrated that individual differences in brain activation predict moral decision making. In particular, pharmacological studies highlighted the crucial role for the neuropeptide oxytocin in social behavior and emotional perception. In the present…

  4. Multisensory perceptual learning of temporal order: audiovisual learning transfers to vision but not audition.

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    David Alais

    2010-06-01

    Full Text Available An outstanding question in sensory neuroscience is whether the perceived timing of events is mediated by a central supra-modal timing mechanism, or multiple modality-specific systems. We use a perceptual learning paradigm to address this question.Three groups were trained daily for 10 sessions on an auditory, a visual or a combined audiovisual temporal order judgment (TOJ. Groups were pre-tested on a range TOJ tasks within and between their group modality prior to learning so that transfer of any learning from the trained task could be measured by post-testing other tasks. Robust TOJ learning (reduced temporal order discrimination thresholds occurred for all groups, although auditory learning (dichotic 500/2000 Hz tones was slightly weaker than visual learning (lateralised grating patches. Crossmodal TOJs also displayed robust learning. Post-testing revealed that improvements in temporal resolution acquired during visual learning transferred within modality to other retinotopic locations and orientations, but not to auditory or crossmodal tasks. Auditory learning did not transfer to visual or crossmodal tasks, and neither did it transfer within audition to another frequency pair. In an interesting asymmetry, crossmodal learning transferred to all visual tasks but not to auditory tasks. Finally, in all conditions, learning to make TOJs for stimulus onsets did not transfer at all to discriminating temporal offsets. These data present a complex picture of timing processes.The lack of transfer between unimodal groups indicates no central supramodal timing process for this task; however, the audiovisual-to-visual transfer cannot be explained without some form of sensory interaction. We propose that auditory learning occurred in frequency-tuned processes in the periphery, precluding interactions with more central visual and audiovisual timing processes. Functionally the patterns of featural transfer suggest that perceptual learning of temporal order

  5. Multisensory perceptual learning of temporal order: audiovisual learning transfers to vision but not audition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Alais, David; Cass, John

    2010-06-23

    An outstanding question in sensory neuroscience is whether the perceived timing of events is mediated by a central supra-modal timing mechanism, or multiple modality-specific systems. We use a perceptual learning paradigm to address this question. Three groups were trained daily for 10 sessions on an auditory, a visual or a combined audiovisual temporal order judgment (TOJ). Groups were pre-tested on a range TOJ tasks within and between their group modality prior to learning so that transfer of any learning from the trained task could be measured by post-testing other tasks. Robust TOJ learning (reduced temporal order discrimination thresholds) occurred for all groups, although auditory learning (dichotic 500/2000 Hz tones) was slightly weaker than visual learning (lateralised grating patches). Crossmodal TOJs also displayed robust learning. Post-testing revealed that improvements in temporal resolution acquired during visual learning transferred within modality to other retinotopic locations and orientations, but not to auditory or crossmodal tasks. Auditory learning did not transfer to visual or crossmodal tasks, and neither did it transfer within audition to another frequency pair. In an interesting asymmetry, crossmodal learning transferred to all visual tasks but not to auditory tasks. Finally, in all conditions, learning to make TOJs for stimulus onsets did not transfer at all to discriminating temporal offsets. These data present a complex picture of timing processes. The lack of transfer between unimodal groups indicates no central supramodal timing process for this task; however, the audiovisual-to-visual transfer cannot be explained without some form of sensory interaction. We propose that auditory learning occurred in frequency-tuned processes in the periphery, precluding interactions with more central visual and audiovisual timing processes. Functionally the patterns of featural transfer suggest that perceptual learning of temporal order may be

  6. BCI and a User’s Judgment of Agency

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Vlek, R.J.; Acken, J.P. van; Beurskens, E.; Roijendijk, L.M.M.; Haselager, W.F.G.; Grübler, G.; Hildt, E.

    2014-01-01

    Performing an action with the assistance of a BCI may affect a user’s judgment of agency, resulting in an illusion of control, or automatism. We analyze this possibility from a theoretical perspective and discuss various factors that might influence a user’s judgment of agency in a BCI context. We

  7. How to make a risk seem riskier

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    Carissa Bonner

    2008-06-01

    Full Text Available Which statement conveys greater risk: ``100 people die from cancer every day'' or ``36,500 people die from cancer every year''? In statistics where both frequencies and temporal information are used to convey risk, two theories predict opposite answers to this question. Construal level theory predicts that ``100 people die from cancer every day'' will be judged as more risky, while the ratio bias predicts that the equivalent ``36,500 people die from cancer every year'' will result in higher risk judgments. An experiment investigated which format produces higher risk ratings, and whether ratings are influenced by increasing the salience of the numerical or temporal part of the statistic. Forty-eight participants were randomly assigned to a numerical, temporal or control salience condition, and rated risk framed as number of deaths per day or per year. The year format was found to result in higher perceived risk, indicating that the ratio bias effect is dominant, but there was no effect of salience.

  8. Utilitarian Moral Judgment Exclusively Coheres with Inference from Is to Ought

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    Shira Elqayam

    2017-06-01

    Full Text Available Faced with moral choice, people either judge according to pre-existing obligations (deontological judgment, or by taking into account the consequences of their actions (utilitarian judgment. We propose that the latter coheres with a more general cognitive mechanism – deontic introduction, the tendency to infer normative (‘deontic’ conclusions from descriptive premises (is-ought inference. Participants were presented with vignettes that allowed either deontological or utilitarian choice, and asked to draw a range of deontic conclusions, as well as judge the overall moral rightness of each choice separately. We predicted and found a selective defeasibility pattern, in which manipulations that suppressed deontic introduction also suppressed utilitarian moral judgment, but had little effect on deontological moral judgment. Thus, deontic introduction coheres with utilitarian moral judgment almost exclusively. We suggest a family of norm-generating informal inferences, in which normative conclusions are drawn from descriptive (although value-laden premises. This family includes deontic introduction and utilitarian moral judgment as well as other informal inferences. We conclude with a call for greater integration of research in moral judgment and research into deontic reasoning and informal inference.

  9. Social trait judgment and affect recognition from static faces and video vignettes in schizophrenia.

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    McIntosh, Lindsey G; Park, Sohee

    2014-09-01

    Social impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia, present from the pre-morbid stage and predictive of outcome, but the etiology of this deficit remains poorly understood. Successful and adaptive social interactions depend on one's ability to make rapid and accurate judgments about others in real time. Our surprising ability to form accurate first impressions from brief exposures, known as "thin slices" of behavior has been studied very extensively in healthy participants. We sought to examine affect and social trait judgment from thin slices of static or video stimuli in order to investigate the ability of schizophrenic individuals to form reliable social impressions of others. 21 individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and 20 matched healthy participants (HC) were asked to identify emotions and social traits for actors in standardized face stimuli as well as brief video clips. Sound was removed from videos to remove all verbal cues. Clinical symptoms in SZ and delusional ideation in both groups were measured. Results showed a general impairment in affect recognition for both types of stimuli in SZ. However, the two groups did not differ in the judgments of trustworthiness, approachability, attractiveness, and intelligence. Interestingly, in SZ, the severity of positive symptoms was correlated with higher ratings of attractiveness, trustworthiness, and approachability. Finally, increased delusional ideation in SZ was associated with a tendency to rate others as more trustworthy, while the opposite was true for HC. These findings suggest that complex social judgments in SZ are affected by symptomatology. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  10. The mere exposure effect is differentially sensitive to different judgment tasks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Seamon, J G; McKenna, P A; Binder, N

    1998-03-01

    The mere exposure effect is the increase in positive affect that results from the repeated exposure to previously novel stimuli. We sought to determine if judgments other than affective preference could reliably produce a mere exposure effect for two-dimensional random shapes. In two experiments, we found that brighter and darker judgments did not differentiate target from distracter shapes, liking judgments led to target selection greater than chance, and disliking judgments led to distracter selection greater than chance. These results for brighter, darker, and liking judgments were obtained regardless of whether shape recognition was greater (Experiment 1) or not greater (Experiment 2) than chance. Effects of prior exposure to novel shapes were reliably observed only for affective judgment tasks. These results are inconsistent with general predictions made by the nonspecific activation hypothesis, but not the affective primacy or perceptual fluency hypotheses which were discussed in terms of cognitive neuroscience research. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

  11. How Do Teachers Make Judgments about Ethical and Unethical Behaviors? Toward the Development of a Code of Conduct for Teachers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Barrett, David E.; Casey, J. Elizabeth; Visser, Ryan D.; Headley, Kathy N.

    2012-01-01

    The authors examined the dimensions that underlie teachers' judgments about ethical versus unethical behaviors. 593 educators and teachers in training were administered a 41 item survey. For each item, respondents rated the extent to which they believed the behavior (a) occurred frequently and (b) represented a serious violation of professional…

  12. Judgments of subtle facial expressions of emotion.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Matsumoto, David; Hwang, Hyisung C

    2014-04-01

    Most studies on judgments of facial expressions of emotion have primarily utilized prototypical, high-intensity expressions. This paper examines judgments of subtle facial expressions of emotion, including not only low-intensity versions of full-face prototypes but also variants of those prototypes. A dynamic paradigm was used in which observers were shown a neutral expression followed by the target expression to judge, and then the neutral expression again, allowing for a simulation of the emergence of the expression from and then return to a baseline. We also examined how signal and intensity clarities of the expressions (explained more fully in the Introduction) were associated with judgment agreement levels. Low-intensity, full-face prototypical expressions of emotion were judged as the intended emotion at rates significantly greater than chance. A number of the proposed variants were also judged as the intended emotions. Both signal and intensity clarities were individually associated with agreement rates; when their interrelationships were taken into account, signal clarity independently predicted agreement rates but intensity clarity did not. The presence or absence of specific muscles appeared to be more important to agreement rates than their intensity levels, with the exception of the intensity of zygomatic major, which was positively correlated with agreement rates for judgments of joy.

  13. Adaptive Anchoring Model: How Static and Dynamic Presentations of Time Series Influence Judgments and Predictions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kusev, Petko; van Schaik, Paul; Tsaneva-Atanasova, Krasimira; Juliusson, Asgeir; Chater, Nick

    2018-01-01

    When attempting to predict future events, people commonly rely on historical data. One psychological characteristic of judgmental forecasting of time series, established by research, is that when people make forecasts from series, they tend to underestimate future values for upward trends and overestimate them for downward ones, so-called trend-damping (modeled by anchoring on, and insufficient adjustment from, the average of recent time series values). Events in a time series can be experienced sequentially (dynamic mode), or they can also be retrospectively viewed simultaneously (static mode), not experienced individually in real time. In one experiment, we studied the influence of presentation mode (dynamic and static) on two sorts of judgment: (a) predictions of the next event (forecast) and (b) estimation of the average value of all the events in the presented series (average estimation). Participants' responses in dynamic mode were anchored on more recent events than in static mode for all types of judgment but with different consequences; hence, dynamic presentation improved prediction accuracy, but not estimation. These results are not anticipated by existing theoretical accounts; we develop and present an agent-based model-the adaptive anchoring model (ADAM)-to account for the difference between processing sequences of dynamically and statically presented stimuli (visually presented data). ADAM captures how variation in presentation mode produces variation in responses (and the accuracy of these responses) in both forecasting and judgment tasks. ADAM's model predictions for the forecasting and judgment tasks fit better with the response data than a linear-regression time series model. Moreover, ADAM outperformed autoregressive-integrated-moving-average (ARIMA) and exponential-smoothing models, while neither of these models accounts for people's responses on the average estimation task. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley

  14. TU Delft expert judgment data base

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Cooke, Roger M.; Goossens, Louis L.H.J.

    2008-01-01

    We review the applications of structured expert judgment uncertainty quantification using the 'classical model' developed at the Delft University of Technology over the last 17 years [Cooke RM. Experts in uncertainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1991; Expert judgment study on atmospheric dispersion and deposition. Report Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics No.01-81, Delft University of Technology; 1991]. These involve 45 expert panels, performed under contract with problem owners who reviewed and approved the results. With a few exceptions, all these applications involved the use of seed variables; that is, variables from the experts' area of expertise for which the true values are available post hoc. Seed variables are used to (1) measure expert performance, (2) enable performance-based weighted combination of experts' distributions, and (3) evaluate and hopefully validate the resulting combination or 'decision maker'. This article reviews the classical model for structured expert judgment and the performance measures, reviews applications, comparing performance-based decision makers with 'equal weight' decision makers, and collects some lessons learned

  15. The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Finucane, M.; Slovic, P.; Johnson, S.M.; Alhakami, A.

    1998-01-01

    The role of affect in judgment of risks and benefits is examined in two studies. Despite using different methodologies the two studies suggest that risk and benefit are linked somehow in people's perception, consequently influencing their judgments. Short paper

  16. COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH OVER THE PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT OF THE FINANCIAL ANALYST

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    Viorica Mirela ŞTEFAN-DUICU

    2016-06-01

    Full Text Available The professional judgment is emblematical at a decisional level. This paper aims to highlight the valences of the professional judgment of the financial analyst by describing the components of its activity and also through highlighting the typologies of the mechanisms involved. Within this paper we have presented the types of financial analysts, the responsibilities that guide the professional judgment and also the interdependent elements of their activity.

  17. The Application of Moral Judgments to Other Cultures: Relativism and Universality.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wainryb, Cecilia

    1993-01-01

    Sixth and tenth graders and college students were asked to apply moral judgments which they had made about a familiar context to contexts in cultures different from their own. Most subjects contextualized their judgments with respect to cultures with different informational beliefs but made nonrelativistic judgments with respect to cultures with…

  18. Effects of prior exposure on music liking and recognition in patients with temporal lobe lesions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Samson, Séverine; Peretz, Isabelle

    2005-12-01

    Prior exposure to music typically increases liking. This manifestation of implicit memory can be dissociated from explicit memory recognition. To examine the contribution of the medial temporal lobe to musical preference and recognition, we tested patients with either left (LTL) or right (RTL) temporal lobe lesions as well as normal control (NC) participants using the procedure of Peretz et al. The results in the affect task showed that NC and LTL participants preferred the studied over nonstudied melodies, thereby demonstrating an implicit exposure effect on liking judgments, whereas RTL patients failed to exhibit this effect. Explicit recognition was impaired in both LTL and RTL patients as compared to NC participants. On the basis of these findings, we suggest that RTL structures play a critical role in the formation of melody representations that support both priming and memory recognition, whereas LTL structures are more involved in the explicit retrieval of melodies. Furthermore, we were able to test an amnesic patient (PC) with bilateral lesions of the temporal lobe. In this case, the exposure effect on liking was also absent. However, repeated exposure to melodies was found to enhance both liking and recognition judgments. This remarkable sparing of memory observed through melody repetition suggests that extensive exposure may assist both implicit and explicit memory in the presence of global amnesia.

  19. Cross-cultural differences in mental representations of time: evidence from an implicit nonlinguistic task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fuhrman, Orly; Boroditsky, Lera

    2010-11-01

    Across cultures people construct spatial representations of time. However, the particular spatial layouts created to represent time may differ across cultures. This paper examines whether people automatically access and use culturally specific spatial representations when reasoning about time. In Experiment 1, we asked Hebrew and English speakers to arrange pictures depicting temporal sequences of natural events, and to point to the hypothesized location of events relative to a reference point. In both tasks, English speakers (who read left to right) arranged temporal sequences to progress from left to right, whereas Hebrew speakers (who read right to left) arranged them from right to left, replicating previous work. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked the participants to make rapid temporal order judgments about pairs of pictures presented one after the other (i.e., to decide whether the second picture showed a conceptually earlier or later time-point of an event than the first picture). Participants made responses using two adjacent keyboard keys. English speakers were faster to make "earlier" judgments when the "earlier" response needed to be made with the left response key than with the right response key. Hebrew speakers showed exactly the reverse pattern. Asking participants to use a space-time mapping inconsistent with the one suggested by writing direction in their language created interference, suggesting that participants were automatically creating writing-direction consistent spatial representations in the course of their normal temporal reasoning. It appears that people automatically access culturally specific spatial representations when making temporal judgments even in nonlinguistic tasks. Copyright © 2010 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  20. Electronic health record tools' support of nurses' clinical judgment and team communication.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kossman, Susan P; Bonney, Leigh Ann; Kim, Myoung Jin

    2013-11-01

    Nurses need to quickly process information to form clinical judgments, communicate with the healthcare team, and guide optimal patient care. Electronic health records not only offer potential for enhanced care but also introduce unintended consequences through changes in workflow, clinical judgment, and communication. We investigated nurses' use of improvised (self-made) and electronic health record-generated cognitive artifacts on clinical judgment and team communication. Tanner's Clinical Judgment Model provided a framework and basis for questions in an online survey and focus group interviews. Findings indicated that (1) nurses rated self-made work lists and medication administration records highest for both clinical judgment and communication, (2) tools aided different dimensions of clinical judgment, and (3) interdisciplinary tools enhance team communication. Implications are that electronic health record tool redesign could better support nursing work.

  1. Psychophysical evaluation of image quality : from judgment to impression

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Ridder, de H.; Rogowitz, B.E.; Pappas, T.N.

    1998-01-01

    Designs of imaging systems, image processing algorithms etc. usually take for granted that methods for assessing perceived image quality produce unbiased estimates of the viewers' quality impression. Quality judgments, however, are affected by the judgment strategies induced by the experimental

  2. The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Finucane, M.; Slovic, P.; Johnson, S.M. [Decision Research, 1201 Oak St, Eugene, Oregon (United States); Alhakami, A. [Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University Psychology Dept. (Saudi Arabia)

    1998-07-01

    The role of affect in judgment of risks and benefits is examined in two studies. Despite using different methodologies the two studies suggest that risk and benefit are linked somehow in people's perception, consequently influencing their judgments. Short paper.

  3. The ABC of moral development: an attachment approach to moral judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Govrin, Aner

    2014-01-01

    As with other cognitive faculties, the etiology of moral judgment and its connection to early development is complex. Because research is limited, the causative and contributory factors to the development of moral judgment in preverbal infants are unclear. However, evidence is emerging from studies within both infant research and moral psychology that may contribute to our understanding of the early development of moral judgments. Though its finding are preliminary, this proposed paradigm synthesizes these findings to generate an overarching, model of the process that appears to contribute to the development of moral judgment in the first year of life. I will propose that through early interactions with the caregiver, the child acquires an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how right/wrong judgments are to be construed, used, and understood. By breaking moral situations down into their defining features, the attachment model of moral judgment outlines a framework for a universal moral faculty based on a universal, innate, deep structure that appears uniformly in the structure of almost all moral judgments regardless of their content. The implications of the model for our understanding of innateness, universal morality, and the representations of moral situations are discussed. PMID:24478739

  4. Can Science Explain the Human Mind? Intuitive Judgments About the Limits of Science.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gottlieb, Sara; Lombrozo, Tania

    2018-01-01

    Can science explain romantic love, morality, and religious belief? We documented intuitive beliefs about the limits of science in explaining the human mind. We considered both epistemic evaluations (concerning whether science could possibly fully explain a given psychological phenomenon) and nonepistemic judgments (concerning whether scientific explanations for a given phenomenon would generate discomfort), and we identified factors that characterize phenomena judged to fall beyond the scope of science. Across six studies, we found that participants were more likely to judge scientific explanations for psychological phenomena to be impossible and uncomfortable when, among other factors, they support first-person, introspective access (e.g., feeling empathetic as opposed to reaching for objects), contribute to making humans exceptional (e.g., appreciating music as opposed to forgetfulness), and involve conscious will (e.g., acting immorally as opposed to having headaches). These judgments about the scope of science have implications for science education, policy, and the public reception of psychological science.

  5. Dynamics of moral judgments in young soldiers during the period of military service

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Oshevskiy D.S.

    2015-08-01

    Full Text Available We have conducted an empirical study of the dynamics of the level of moral judgments in the military. Two groups of Missile Defense Force soldiers present the sample: preparing for demobilization (n=30 and new recruits (n=25. As the methods we used specially developed semi-structured interview modeling the situation of moral choice, and the questionnaire in order to assess the socio-psychological characteristics of the military and their attitude to service. The young soldiers have a positive trend in the development of moral judgments and a greater differentiation in the estimates. It is shown that the old-timers in comparison with newcomers have intensive development of group-oriented and prosocial moral reasoning. It presumably connected with successful adaptation to military service, following the manual, the ability to cope with aggressive impulses, flexibility and value assessments in decision-making. It is noted that educational work with young recruits should include measures to increase group cohesion in the army.

  6. ´SOMETHING SIMILAR I’VE ALREADY LEARNED, THUS I EASILY WILL REMEMBER IT!´: THE EASE-OF-PROCESSING HEURISTIC AS A SOURCE IN METAMEMORY JUDGMENTS UNDER PROACTIVE INTERFERENCE CONDITION

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Viktoriia Voloshyna

    2014-12-01

    Full Text Available In line with some metamemory literature, people are unable to predict the influence of interference on their metacognitive ability to prognosticate future memory performance (Eakin, 2005. However, according to other researchers, there are certain circumstances in which an individual can predict the factors that restrict access to the target information in memory (Maki, 1999; Diaz & Benjamin, 2011. Henceforth, this study is aimed at investigating the ease of processing heuristics as a source of errors on the meta-level in terms of proactive interference (PI, as well as the conditions under which it is possible to avoid its negative impact on the accuracy of different types of metamemory judgments. To do this, we encouraged participants to make metamemory judgments (e.g., EOL, JOL under the time pressure and without it (non-analytic and analytic groups in two different conditions (interference and control. Our findings demonstrate that (i fast metamemory judgments are based on ease-of-processing heuristics, which enhances the “illusion of knowing” (see Eakin, 2005; (ii inferences during study allocation can diminish the effect of the “illusion of knowing” phenomenon. In addition, analytic inference leads to more accurate metamemory performance under PI condition. In addition, analytical metamemory judgments are more accurate under PI condition; also it should be concluded that, despite the fact that the primary source of information in making EOL judgments is ease-of-processing heuristics, in this process some other resources, analogical to JOL judgments, were involved.

  7. GROUPS DECISION MAKING WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Anca Stan

    2008-12-01

    Full Text Available In a highly global market, organizations that have the ability to analyze and rapidly respond to the constantly changing marketplace will have the greatest chance of remaining competitive and profitable. Group decision making is the process of arriving at a judgment based upon the feedback of multiple individuals. Due to the importance of the group decision making process, decision making models can be used to establish a systematic means of developing effective group decision making. Once a decision has been made, the members of the group should be willing to accept it and support its implementations.

  8. The Importance Of Integrating Narrative Into Health Care Decision Making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dohan, Daniel; Garrett, Sarah B; Rendle, Katharine A; Halley, Meghan; Abramson, Corey

    2016-04-01

    When making health care decisions, patients and consumers use data but also gather stories from family and friends. When advising patients, clinicians consult the medical evidence but also use professional judgment. These stories and judgments, as well as other forms of narrative, shape decision making but remain poorly understood. Furthermore, qualitative research methods to examine narrative are rarely included in health science research. We illustrate how narratives shape decision making and explain why it is difficult but necessary to integrate qualitative research on narrative into the health sciences. We draw on social-scientific insights on rigorous qualitative research and our ongoing studies of decision making by patients with cancer, and we describe new tools and approaches that link qualitative research findings with the predominantly quantitative health science scholarship. Finally, we highlight the benefits of more fully integrating qualitative research and narrative analysis into the medical evidence base and into evidence-based medical practice. Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.

  9. Gender-specific effects of emotional modulation on visual temporal order thresholds.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liang, Wei; Zhang, Jiyuan; Bao, Yan

    2015-09-01

    Emotions affect temporal information processing in the low-frequency time window of a few seconds, but little is known about their effect in the high-frequency domain of some tens of milliseconds. The present study aims to investigate whether negative and positive emotional states influence the ability to discriminate the temporal order of visual stimuli, and whether gender plays a role in temporal processing. Due to the hemispheric lateralization of emotion, a hemispheric asymmetry between the left and the right visual field might be expected. Using a block design, subjects were primed with neutral, negative and positive emotional pictures before performing temporal order judgment tasks. Results showed that male subjects exhibited similarly reduced order thresholds under negative and positive emotional states, while female subjects demonstrated increased threshold under positive emotional state and reduced threshold under negative emotional state. Besides, emotions influenced female subjects more intensely than male subjects, and no hemispheric lateralization was observed. These observations indicate an influence of emotional states on temporal order processing of visual stimuli, and they suggest a gender difference, which is possibly associated with a different emotional stability.

  10. Sidetracked by trolleys: Why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little (or nothing) about utilitarian judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kahane, Guy

    2015-01-01

    Research into moral decision-making has been dominated by sacrificial dilemmas where, in order to save several lives, it is necessary to sacrifice the life of another person. It is widely assumed that these dilemmas draw a sharp contrast between utilitarian and deontological approaches to morality, and thereby enable us to study the psychological and neural basis of utilitarian judgment. However, it has been previously shown that some sacrificial dilemmas fail to present a genuine contrast between utilitarian and deontological options. Here, I raise deeper problems for this research paradigm. Even when sacrificial dilemmas present a contrast between utilitarian and deontological options at a philosophical level, it is misleading to interpret the responses of ordinary folk in these terms. What is currently classified as "utilitarian judgment" does not in fact share essential features of a genuine utilitarian outlook, and is better explained in terms of commonsensical moral notions. When subjects deliberate about such dilemmas, they are not deciding between opposing utilitarian and deontological solutions, but engaging in a richer process of weighing opposing moral reasons. Sacrificial dilemmas therefore tell us little about utilitarian decision-making. An alternative approach to studying proto-utilitarian tendencies in everyday moral thinking is proposed.

  11. Transcranial direct current stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex shifts preference of moral judgments.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Maria Kuehne

    Full Text Available Attitude to morality, reflecting cultural norms and values, is considered unique to human social behavior. Resulting moral behavior in a social environment is controlled by a widespread neural network including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, which plays an important role in decision making. In the present study we investigate the influence of neurophysiological modulation of DLPFC reactivity by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS on moral reasoning. For that purpose we administered anodal, cathodal, and sham stimulation of the left DLPFC while subjects judged the appropriateness of hard moral personal dilemmas. In contrast to sham and cathodal stimulation, anodal stimulation induced a shift in judgment of personal moral dilemmas towards more non-utilitarian actions. Our results demonstrate that alterations of left DLPFC activity can change moral judgments and, in consequence, provide a causal link between left DLPFC activity and moral reasoning. Most important, the observed shift towards non-utilitarian actions suggests that moral decision making is not a permanent individual trait but can be manipulated; consequently individuals with boundless, uncontrollable, and maladaptive moral behavior, such as found in psychopathy, might benefit from neuromodulation-based approaches.

  12. Experiencing Physical Pain Leads to More Sympathetic Moral Judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Xiao, Qianguo; Zhu, Yi; Luo, Wen-bo

    2015-01-01

    Previous studies have shown that observing another’s pain can evoke other-oriented emotions, which instigate empathic concern for another’s needs. It is not clear whether experiencing first-hand physical pain may also evoke other-oriented emotion and thus influence people’s moral judgment. Based on the embodied simulation literature and neuroimaging evidence, the present research tested the idea that participants who experienced physical pain would be more sympathetic in their moral judgments. Study 1 showed that ice-induced physical pain facilitated higher self-assessments of empathy, which motivated participants to be more sympathetic in their moral judgments. Study 2 confirmed findings in study 1 and also showed that State Perspective Taking subscale of the State Empathy Scale mediated the effects of physical pain on moral judgment. These results provide support for embodied view of morality and for the view that pain can serve a positive psychosocial function. PMID:26465603

  13. The accuracy of meta-metacognitive judgments: regulating the realism of confidence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Buratti, Sandra; Allwood, Carl Martin

    2012-08-01

    Can people improve the realism of their confidence judgments about the correctness of their episodic memory reports by deselecting the least realistic judgments? An assumption of Koriat and Goldsmith's (Psychol Rev 103:490-517, 1996) model is that confidence judgments regulate the reporting of memory reports. We tested whether this assumption generalizes to the regulation of the realism (accuracy) of confidence judgments. In two experiments, 270 adults in separate conditions answered 50 recognition and recall questions about the contents of a just-seen video. After each answer, they made confidence judgments about the answer's correctness. In Experiment 1, the participants in the recognition conditions significantly increased their absolute bias when they excluded 15 questions. In Experiment 2, the participants in the recall condition significantly improved their calibration. The results indicate that recall, more than recognition, offers valid cues for participants to increase the realism of their report. However, the effects were small with only weak support for the conclusion that people have some ability to regulate the realism in their confidence judgments.

  14. Construal levels and moral judgment: Some complications

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Han Gong

    2012-09-01

    Full Text Available Eyal, T., Liberman, N., and Trope, Y., (2008. Judging near and distant virtue and vice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1204-1209, explored how psychological distance influences moral judgment and found that more extreme moral appraisals were given to distal behaviors rather than proximal behaviors. Contrary to Eyal et al., the current paper presents converging evidence showing that moral judgments become more extreme at lower-level construals compared to higher-level construals. In four experiments using two different priming techniques, we manipulated construal levels and assessed their effects on moral judgment. High-level consturals elicited less moral outrage toward transgressions and less positive ratings of virtuous behaviors than low-level construals. A replication study was also conducted to reconcile the inconsistencies between the current results and those of Eyal et al. Possible explanations for the different results between two studies are discussed.

  15. Extraversion, neuroticism, immoral judgment and criminal behaviour.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Addad, M; Leslau, A

    1989-01-01

    The present study examines delinquent behaviour by integrating two approaches until now employed separately: Eysnck's theory linking delinquency to extraversion and neuroticism, and Kohlberg's theory of moral development and its connection to moral behaviour. The study analyzes the relations between extraversion, neuroticism and moral judgment, as well as their independent and/or interactive effect upon the development of anti-social behaviour. The relationships are tested by retrospective measurements of personality traits and moral judgment in three groups: delinquency (N = 203), control (N = 82) and comparative (N = 407) groups. Findings show that criminals are higher than control subjects in neuroticism and immoral judgment but not in extraversion. Similar relationships were found between criminals and the comparative group, with one exception: here extraversion was found to be positively related to delinquency, both independently and interactively with neuroticism. The implications of these results for differential development of anti-social behaviour are discussed.

  16. How Large Is the Role of Emotion in Judgments of Moral Dilemmas?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Horne, Zachary; Powell, Derek

    2016-01-01

    Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judgments about moral dilemmas has recently been called into question. In the present studies, we reexamined the role of emotion in people's judgments about moral dilemmas using a validated self-report measure of emotion. We measured participants' specific emotional responses to moral dilemmas and, although we found that moral dilemmas evoked strong emotional responses, we found that these responses were only weakly correlated with participants' moral judgments. We argue that the purportedly strong connection between emotion and judgments of moral dilemmas may have been overestimated.

  17. Temporal and Spectral Cues for Musical Timbre Perception in Electric Hearing

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Kong, Ying-Yee; Mullangi, Ala; Marozeau, Jeremy

    2011-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to investigate musical timbre perception in cochlear-implant (CI) listeners using a multidimensional scaling technique to derive a timbre space. Methods: Sixteen stimuli that synthesized western musical instruments were used (McAdams, Winsberg, Donnadieu, De Soete......, & Krimphoff, 1995). Eight CI listeners and 15 normalhearing (NH) listeners participated. Each listener made judgments of dissimilarity between stimulus pairs. Acoustical analyses that characterized the temporal and spectral characteristics of each stimulus were performed to examine the psychophysical nature...... of each perceptual dimension. For NH listeners, the timbre space was best represented in three dimensions, one correlated with the temporal envelope (log-attack time) of the stimuli, one correlated with the spectral envelope (spectral centroid), and one correlated with the spectral fine structure...

  18. Intuitive and Deliberate Judgments Are Based on Common Principles

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kruglanski, Arie W.; Gigerenzer, Gerd

    2011-01-01

    A popular distinction in cognitive and social psychology has been between "intuitive" and "deliberate" judgments. This juxtaposition has aligned in dual-process theories of reasoning associative, unconscious, effortless, heuristic, and suboptimal processes (assumed to foster intuitive judgments) versus rule-based, conscious, effortful, analytic,…

  19. People use the memory for past-test heuristic as an explicit cue for judgments of learning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Serra, Michael J; Ariel, Robert

    2014-11-01

    When people estimate their memory for to-be-learned material over multiple study-test trials, they tend to base their judgments of learning (JOLs) on their test performance for those materials on the previous trial. Their use of this information-known as the memory for past-test (MPT) heuristic-is believed to be responsible for improvements in the relative accuracy (resolution) of people's JOLs across learning trials. Although participants seem to use past-test information as a major basis for their JOLs, little is known about how learners translate this information into a judgment of learning. Toward this end, in two experiments, we examined whether participants factored past-test performance into their JOLs in either an explicit, theory-based way or an implicit way. To do so, we had one group of participants (learners) study paired associates, make JOLs, and take a test on two study-test trials. Other participants (observers) viewed learners' protocols and made JOLs for the learners. Presumably, observers could only use theory-based information to make JOLs for the learners, which allowed us to estimate the contribution of explicit and implicit information to learners' JOLs. Our analyses suggest that all participants factored simple past-test performance into their JOLs in an explicit, theory-based way but that this information made limited contributions to improvements in relative accuracy across trials. In contrast, learners also used other privileged, implicit information about their learning to inform their judgments (that observers had no access to) that allowed them to achieve further improvements in relative accuracy across trials.

  20. THE JUDGMENTS CONTENT ABOUT THE OTHERS IS CONDITIONED BY THE SELF-STRUCTURE OF THE PERSON

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nina Yuditseva

    2014-04-01

    Full Text Available The article presents a conceptual model explaining the genesis of person judgments about the others as mediated by motivation regulation. The model is drawn from knowledge theory which has been designed by Losskiy and Frank at the first half of the twentieth century and pertains to phenomenological branch of Non Marxism epistemology. They consider a person body as an external object implicitly existing along with the other objects in person’s cognition without awareness. Self –regulation of Big Two motives makes sensory and insensible mental person’s motives on the one hand and external to him on the other hand to be organized into representation’s structure. The self appears to be the structure of motives’ representation “I-not I” to the person. Self-structure is expected to define perspective-taking of another person and judgment regarding him. The present research checks whether participant’s judgments regarding himself and of the others are related to his motivation strategy. The strategy of innate Big Two motivation was revealed by Szondy test, the test of incomplete utterances was used for discovering of the judgments about itself and of the others. Correspondence analysis (Greenacre confirms that unconscious taking perspective by the participant regarding himself and of the others is depended upon his motivation strategy. Taking the perspective "not I, the others" is conditioned by impersonal strategy; the perspective "I and the others" is related by self-determined strategy. The focus "I, not the others" relates to self-centered strategy while communicative one takes “not I, not the others" perspective. In addition the significant positive correlation was discovered between participant’s motivation strategy and judgment’s preference in the aggregate of all utterances about others, and also it was proved natural the absence of this in the aggregate of all utterances about itself. Participant’s motivation strategy

  1. Error Parsing: An alternative method of implementing social judgment theory

    OpenAIRE

    Crystal C. Hall; Daniel M. Oppenheimer

    2015-01-01

    We present a novel method of judgment analysis called Error Parsing, based upon an alternative method of implementing Social Judgment Theory (SJT). SJT and Error Parsing both posit the same three components of error in human judgment: error due to noise, error due to cue weighting, and error due to inconsistency. In that sense, the broad theory and framework are the same. However, SJT and Error Parsing were developed to answer different questions, and thus use different m...

  2. How Large Is the Role of Emotion in Judgments of Moral Dilemmas?

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Zachary Horne

    Full Text Available Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judgments about moral dilemmas has recently been called into question. In the present studies, we reexamined the role of emotion in people's judgments about moral dilemmas using a validated self-report measure of emotion. We measured participants' specific emotional responses to moral dilemmas and, although we found that moral dilemmas evoked strong emotional responses, we found that these responses were only weakly correlated with participants' moral judgments. We argue that the purportedly strong connection between emotion and judgments of moral dilemmas may have been overestimated.

  3. Original and Derived Judgment

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Foss, Kirsten; Foss, Nicolai Juul; Klein, Peter G.

    and own assets. The entrepreneur's role, then, is to arrange or organize the human and capital assets under his control. We extend this Knightian concept of the firm by developing a theory of delegation under Knightian uncertainty. What we call original judgment belongs exclusively to owners, but owners...

  4. Variability of Creativity Judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Caroff, Xavier; Besancon, Maud

    2008-01-01

    The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), developed by Amabile [Amabile, T.M. (1982). "Social psychology of creativity: A consensual assessment technique." "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology," 43, 997-1013], is frequently used to evaluate the creativity of productions. Judgments obtained with CAT are usually reliable and valid.…

  5. Clinical judgment in reflective journals of prelicensure nursing students.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bussard, Michelle E

    2015-01-01

    Clinical judgment is an essential skill needed by RNs. Employers expect new graduate nurses to enter the work-force with established clinical judgment skills. Therefore, nurse educators must ensure that prelicensure nursing students develop clinical judgment before graduation. This qualitative, interpretive description study reviewed the reflective journals of 30 prelicensure nursing students who participated in four progressive high-fidelity simulation (HFS) scenarios during a medical-surgical nursing course. Eight themes were identified in the reflective journals: (a) expectations about the patient, (b) recognition of a focused assessment, (c) interpretation of medications, laboratory data, and diagnostics, (d) communication with the patient, (e) collaboration and interprofessionalism, (f) prioritizing interventions, (g) skillfulness with interventions, and (h) incorporation of skills and information into real patient situations. This study indicated that reflective journaling following progressive HFS scenarios may be an effective teaching-learning strategy to assist prelicensure nursing students in the development of clinical judgment. Copyright 2015, SLACK Incorporated.

  6. Credibility judgments of narratives: language, plausibility, and absorption.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nahari, Galit; Glicksohn, Joseph; Nachson, Israel

    2010-01-01

    Two experiments were conducted in order to find out whether textual features of narratives differentially affect credibility judgments made by judges having different levels of absorption (a disposition associated with rich visual imagination). Participants in both experiments were exposed to a textual narrative and requested to judge whether the narrator actually experienced the event he described in his story. In Experiment 1, the narrative varied in terms of language (literal, figurative) and plausibility (ordinary, anomalous). In Experiment 2, the narrative varied in terms of language only. The participants' perceptions of the plausibility of the story described and the extent to which they were absorbed in reading were measured. The data from both experiments together suggest that the groups applied entirely different criteria in credibility judgments. For high-absorption individuals, their credibility judgment depends on the degree to which the text can be assimilated into their own vivid imagination, whereas for low-absorption individuals it depends mainly on plausibility. That is, high-absorption individuals applied an experiential mental set while judging the credibility of the narrator, whereas low-absorption individuals applied an instrumental mental set. Possible cognitive mechanisms and implications for credibility judgments are discussed.

  7. Temporal characteristics of decisions in hospital encounters: a threshold for shared decision making? A qualitative study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ofstad, Eirik H; Frich, Jan C; Schei, Edvin; Frankel, Richard M; Gulbrandsen, Pål

    2014-11-01

    To identify and characterize physicians' statements that contained evidence of clinically relevant decisions in encounters with patients in different hospital settings. Qualitative analysis of 50 videotaped encounters from wards, the emergency room (ER) and outpatient clinics in a department of internal medicine at a Norwegian university hospital. Clinical decisions could be grouped in a temporal order: decisions which had already been made, and were brought into the encounter by the physician (preformed decisions), decisions made in the present (here-and-now decisions), and decisions prescribing future actions given a certain course of events (conditional decisions). Preformed decisions were a hallmark in the ward and conditional decisions a main feature of ER encounters. Clinical decisions related to a patient-physician encounter spanned a time frame exceeding the duration of the encounter. While a distribution of decisions over time and space fosters sharing and dilution of responsibility between providers, it makes the decision making process hard to access for patients. In order to plan when and how to involve patients in decisions, physicians need increased awareness of when clinical decisions are made, who usually makes them, and who should make them. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  8. Neuroeconomics: cross-currents in research on decision-making

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Sanfey, A.G.; Loewenstein, G.; McClure, S.M.; Cohen, J.D.

    2006-01-01

    Despite substantial advances, the question of how we make decisions and judgments continues to pose important challenges for scientific research. Historically, different disciplines have approached this problem using different techniques and assumptions, with few unifying efforts made. However, the

  9. Rationality and Emotions in Decision Making

    OpenAIRE

    Olga Markic

    2009-01-01

    Decision making is traditionally viewed as a rational process where reason calculates the best way to achieve the goal. Investigations from different areas of cognitive science have shown that human decisions and actions are much more influenced by intuition and emotional responses then it was previously thought. In this paper I examine the role of emotion in decision making, particularly Damasio’s hypothesis of somatic markers and Green’s dual process theory of moral judgment. I conclude the...

  10. Effects of Gain/Loss Framing in Cyber Defense Decision-Making

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Bos, Nathan; Paul, Celeste; Gersh, John; Greenberg, Ariel; Piatko, Christine; Sperling, Scott; Spitaletta, Jason; Arendt, Dustin L.; Burtner, Edwin R.

    2016-10-24

    Cyber defense requires decision making under uncertainty. Yet this critical area has not been a strong focus of research in judgment and decision-making. Future defense systems, which will rely on software-defined networks and may employ ‘moving target’ defenses, will increasingly automate lower level detection and analysis, but will still require humans in the loop for higher level judgment. We studied the decision making process and outcomes of 17 experienced network defense professionals who worked through a set of realistic network defense scenarios. We manipulated gain versus loss framing in a cyber defense scenario, and found significant effects in one of two focal problems. Defenders that began with a network already in quarantine (gain framing) used a quarantine system more than those that did not (loss framing). We also found some difference in perceived workload and efficacy. Alternate explanations of these findings and implications for network defense are discussed.

  11. Teacher Judgment in Assessing Students' Social Behavior within a Response-to-Intervention Framework: Using What Teachers Know

    Science.gov (United States)

    Walker, Hill M.; Marquez, Brion; Yeaton, Pamela; Pennefather, Jordan; Forness, Steven R.; Vincent, Claudia G.

    2015-01-01

    This article is focused on the initial development and trial testing of a brief teacher rating tool that can be used for universal screening and tracking of instructionally relevant forms of student social behavior over time. A 12-item scale is described in which teachers make judgments about student performance on a skills-based rather than a…

  12. Bridging the Divide: The Role of Motivation and Self-Regulation in Explaining the Judgment-Action Gap Related to Academic Dishonesty

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jason M. Stephens

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available There is often a divide between moral judgment and moral action; between what we believe we ought to do (or not do and what we do. Knowledge of this divide is not new, and numerous theories have attempted to offer more robust accounts of ethical decision-making and moral functioning. Knowledge of widespread academic dishonesty among students is also not new, and several studies have revealed that many students report cheating despite believing it is wrong. The present study, involving cross-sectional survey data from a sample of secondary students (N = 380 in the United States, contributes to the literature on this important area of theory and research by fulfilling three broad purposes. The first purpose concerned the assessment of students' judgments related to academic dishonesty, and offered evidence for the utility of a new instrument that measures what domain (personal, conventional, or moral students use to categorize various types of cheating behavior rather than how much they believe it to be wrong. The second purpose involved exploring the relations between domain judgments and engagement in academic dishonesty, and results provided evidence for the hypothesis that students who believed an action to be morally wrong would be less likely to report doing it. Finally, the third and most important purpose of the study involved bridging the divide between moral judgment and action of academic dishonesty by testing competing theoretical models of moral functioning. Results indicated that the data demonstrated the best fit to a modified version of the hypothesized four-component model, whereby self-regulation (in the form of selective moral disengagement played a significant mediating role in the relations between moral judgment and academic dishonesty, and that moral judgment also affected self-regulation indirectly through moral motivation (i.e., responsibility judgments. In brief, findings from this study offer support for the contention

  13. Surprisingly rational: probability theory plus noise explains biases in judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Costello, Fintan; Watts, Paul

    2014-07-01

    The systematic biases seen in people's probability judgments are typically taken as evidence that people do not use the rules of probability theory when reasoning about probability but instead use heuristics, which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes yield systematic biases. This view has had a major impact in economics, law, medicine, and other fields; indeed, the idea that people cannot reason with probabilities has become a truism. We present a simple alternative to this view, where people reason about probability according to probability theory but are subject to random variation or noise in the reasoning process. In this account the effect of noise is canceled for some probabilistic expressions. Analyzing data from 2 experiments, we find that, for these expressions, people's probability judgments are strikingly close to those required by probability theory. For other expressions, this account produces systematic deviations in probability estimates. These deviations explain 4 reliable biases in human probabilistic reasoning (conservatism, subadditivity, conjunction, and disjunction fallacies). These results suggest that people's probability judgments embody the rules of probability theory and that biases in those judgments are due to the effects of random noise. (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

  14. Vision-based judgment of tomato maturity under growth conditions ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    To determine the picking time of tomato and design the control strategy for the harvesting robot, the judgment of tomato maturity under natural conditions is ... Hue-mean and red-green color-difference image mean can be used as a criterion for the judgment of tomato maturity, and the tests indicated that the redgreen mean ...

  15. Liberating reason from the passions: overriding intuitionist moral judgments through emotion reappraisal.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Feinberg, Matthew; Willer, Robb; Antonenko, Olga; John, Oliver P

    2012-07-01

    A classic problem in moral psychology concerns whether and when moral judgments are driven by intuition versus deliberate reasoning. In this investigation, we explored the role of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that involves construing an emotion-eliciting situation in a way that diminishes the intensity of the emotional experience. We hypothesized that although emotional reactions evoke initial moral intuitions, reappraisal weakens the influence of these intuitions, leading to more deliberative moral judgments. Three studies of moral judgments in emotionally evocative, disgust-eliciting moral dilemmas supported our hypothesis. A greater tendency to reappraise was related to fewer intuition-based judgments (Study 1). Content analysis of open-ended descriptions of moral-reasoning processes revealed that reappraisal was associated with longer time spent in deliberation and with fewer intuitionist moral judgments (Study 2). Finally, in comparison with participants who simply watched an emotion-inducing film, participants who had been instructed to reappraise their reactions while watching the film subsequently reported less intense emotional reactions to moral dilemmas, and these dampened reactions led, in turn, to fewer intuitionist moral judgments (Study 3).

  16. The Memory State Heuristic: A Formal Model Based on Repeated Recognition Judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Castela, Marta; Erdfelder, Edgar

    2017-01-01

    The recognition heuristic (RH) theory predicts that, in comparative judgment tasks, if one object is recognized and the other is not, the recognized one is chosen. The memory-state heuristic (MSH) extends the RH by assuming that choices are not affected by recognition judgments per se, but by the memory states underlying these judgments (i.e.,…

  17. Disgust sensitivity is primarily associated with purity-based moral judgments

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Wagemans, F.M.A.; Brandt, M.J.; Zeelenberg, M.

    2018-01-01

    Individual differences in disgust sensitivity are associated with a range of judgments and attitudes related to the moral domain. Some perspectives suggest that the association between disgust sensitivity and moral judgments will be equally strong across all moral domains (i.e., purity, authority,

  18. Hermeneutics, evidence ad judgment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Michele Taruffo

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available The text analyzes several topics of the judicial process from the point of view of the important contributions offered by the hermeneutical philosophy. It deals mainly with the construction of factual narratives, the presentation of evidence and the discovery of truth made by the judge in his final judgment based upon the evidence.

  19. E-learning task analysis making temporal evolution graphics on symptoms of waves and the ability to solve problems

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rosdiana, L.; Widodo, W.; Nurita, T.; Fauziah, A. N. M.

    2018-04-01

    This study aimed to describe the ability of pre-service teachers to create graphs, solve the problem of spatial and temporal evolution on the symptoms of vibrations and waves. The learning was conducted using e-learning method. The research design is a quasi-experimental design with one-shot case study. The e-learning contained learning materials and tasks involving answering tasks, making questions, solving their own questions, and making graphs. The participants of the study was 28 students of Science Department, Universitas Negeri Surabaya. The results obtained by using the e-learning were that the students’ ability increase gradually from task 1 to task 3 (the tasks consisted of three tasks). Additionally, based on the questionnaire with 28 respondents, it showed that 24 respondents stated that making graphs via e-learning were still difficult. Four respondents said that it was easy to make graphs via e-learning. Nine respondents stated that the e-learning did not help them in making graphs and 19 respondents stated that the e-learning help in creating graphs. The conclusion of the study is that the students was able to make graphs on paper sheet, but they got difficulty to make the graphs in e-learning (the virtual form).

  20. Large Spatial and Temporal Separations of Cause and Effect in Policy Making - Dealing with Non-linear Effects

    Science.gov (United States)

    McCaskill, John

    There can be large spatial and temporal separation of cause and effect in policy making. Determining the correct linkage between policy inputs and outcomes can be highly impractical in the complex environments faced by policy makers. In attempting to see and plan for the probable outcomes, standard linear models often overlook, ignore, or are unable to predict catastrophic events that only seem improbable due to the issue of multiple feedback loops. There are several issues with the makeup and behaviors of complex systems that explain the difficulty many mathematical models (factor analysis/structural equation modeling) have in dealing with non-linear effects in complex systems. This chapter highlights those problem issues and offers insights to the usefulness of ABM in dealing with non-linear effects in complex policy making environments.

  1. Causal explanations affect judgments of the need for psychological treatment

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nancy S. Kim

    2009-02-01

    Full Text Available Knowing what event precipitated a client's abnormal behaviors makes the client appear more normal than if the event is not known (Meehl, 1973. Does such knowledge also influence judgments of the need for psychological treatment, and if so, does it matter whether the precipitating event was inside or outside the client's control? We presented undergraduates with cases of hypothetical clients exhibiting abnormal behaviors and manipulated whether they were also told of a precipitating event explaining those behaviors. Knowing the precipitant significantly reduced perceptions of clients' need for treatment, but only when the precipitating event was outside the client's control. These findings call into question the notion that it need always be beneficial for an outside reasoner to uncover the root cause of a client's psychological problems, particularly when the root cause is still unknown to the client. The rationality of the effect and additional implications for decision-making are discussed.

  2. A bunswik lens model of consumer health judgments of packaged foods

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Orquin, Jacob Lund

    2014-01-01

    Consumer health judgments of packaged food were compared with an objective healthfulness criterion using a Brunswik lens model. Consumer judgments were obtained from a representative consumer sample (N= 1329) who evaluated the healthfulness of 198 packaged food products. The objective healthfulne...... on the food category and to a lesser extent on the brand and consumer familiarity with the product. The results are in conflict with consumers’ self-reported use of nutrition information but are in accordance with findings from studies using implicit methods.......Consumer health judgments of packaged food were compared with an objective healthfulness criterion using a Brunswik lens model. Consumer judgments were obtained from a representative consumer sample (N= 1329) who evaluated the healthfulness of 198 packaged food products. The objective healthfulness...... representativeness. The study revealed that the objective healthfulness criterion is highly predictable on the basis of cues such as the food category, brand, carbohydrate content, and whether the food is a typical “light” product. However, consumer judgments of food healthfulness are based almost entirely...

  3. Music for a Brighter World: Brightness Judgment Bias by Musical Emotion.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bhattacharya, Joydeep; Lindsen, Job P

    2016-01-01

    A prevalent conceptual metaphor is the association of the concepts of good and evil with brightness and darkness, respectively. Music cognition, like metaphor, is possibly embodied, yet no study has addressed the question whether musical emotion can modulate brightness judgment in a metaphor consistent fashion. In three separate experiments, participants judged the brightness of a grey square that was presented after a short excerpt of emotional music. The results of Experiment 1 showed that short musical excerpts are effective emotional primes that cross-modally influence brightness judgment of visual stimuli. Grey squares were consistently judged as brighter after listening to music with a positive valence, as compared to music with a negative valence. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that the bias in brightness judgment does not require an active evaluation of the emotional content of the music. By applying a different experimental procedure in Experiment 3, we showed that this brightness judgment bias is indeed a robust effect. Altogether, our findings demonstrate a powerful role of musical emotion in biasing brightness judgment and that this bias is aligned with the metaphor viewpoint.

  4. The Relationship between Temporal Measures of Oral Fluency and Ratings of Fluency: A Case of Iranian Advanced EFL Learners

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ali Akbar Farahani

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available Objective fluency judgment has always been a formidable task in language testing. Nonetheless, temporal fluency is the type of fluency which can be measured and quantified. Given that, temporal fluency is also known as temporal measures of fluency (Luoma, 2004. Furthermore, it has aroused considerable interest in analyzing speech of language learners in terms of quantitative measures (Kormos & Denes, 2004; Freed, 1995; Riggenbach, 1991; Lennon, 1990. They suggested that certain measures of fluency can more objectively specify fluency level and that perceptual understanding of fluency to a high extent correlate with these measures. Following these studies, the present study was an endeavor to relate quantitative measures of fluency and assessment of fluency in oral speech of L2 learners. To do so 30 advanced EFL learners whose speaking score on TOEFL iBT scale was between 19 to 22, i.e. B2 on CEFR scale, were selected. Then, they were given a picture strip as the elicitation task and asked to make up a story based on that. Their voice was recorded, transcribed and further analyzed by voice analysis software called PRAAT to calculate seven measures of fluency. Meanwhile, two trained listeners were required to rate the recordings, scoring them from 1 to 9. Finally, the relationship between these variables was calculated. The results showed that judge listeners’ ratings of fluency were highly correlated with speech rate, phonation time ratio, and mean length of runs. Moreover, among the measures of temporal fluency speech rate proved significantly correlated with articulation rate, phonation time ratio, and mean length of runs.

  5. Elicitation and use of expert judgment in performance assessment for high-level radioactive waste repositories

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Bonano, E.J.; Hora, S.C.; Keeney, R.L.; von Winterfeldt, D.

    1990-05-01

    This report presents the concept of formalizing the elicitation and use of expert judgment in the performance assessment of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) repositories in deep geologic formations. The report begins with a discussion of characteristics (advantages and disadvantages) of formalizing expert judgment examples of previous uses of expert judgment in radioactive waste programs, criteria that can assist in deciding when to formalize expert judgment, and the relationship of formal use of expert judgment to data collection and modeling. The current state of the art with respect to the elicitation, use, and communication of formal expert judgment is presented. The report concludes with a discussion on potential applications of formal expert judgment in performance assessment of HLW repositories. 93 refs

  6. An Experimental Research on the pCI Rule and Causal Judgment (in Chinese)

    OpenAIRE

    Shao, Z. F.; Wang, J.

    2005-01-01

    This research examined the precision of the pCI rule through three experiments. The results show that first , the tendency of the subjects’ casual judgments was basically similar to the pCI rule. But (a + d) / n predicted human’s casual judgments were even better; second, the increase of subjects’ casual judgments was milder than the pCI rule, and the subjects needed time to construct their own way of judging relationship; finally, different people had different ways of causal judgments, and ...

  7. Toward a psychology of surrogate decision-making

    OpenAIRE

    Tunney, Richard J.; Ziegler, Fenja

    2016-01-01

    Many of the decisions that we make in everyday life are made for the benefit of other people. However, research suggests that people often make decisions on behalf of other people that are different from those that the other person would choose for himself or herself. This raises practical problems in the case of legally designated surrogate decision-makers who may not meet the legal normative benchmark — the substituted judgment standard. We review evidence from our own ...

  8. Influence of Immersive Human Scale Architectural Representation on Design Judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Elder, Rebecca L.

    Unrealistic visual representation of architecture within our existing environments have lost all reference to the human senses. As a design tool, visual and auditory stimuli can be utilized to determine human's perception of design. This experiment renders varying building inputs within different sites, simulated with corresponding immersive visual and audio sensory cues. Introducing audio has been proven to influence the way a person perceives a space, yet most inhabitants rely strictly on their sense of vision to make design judgments. Though not as apparent, users prefer spaces that have a better quality of sound and comfort. Through a series of questions, we can begin to analyze whether a design is fit for both an acoustic and visual environment.

  9. Effects of Behavioral and Social Class Information on Social Judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Baron, Reuben M.; And Others

    1995-01-01

    Investigated the role of disconfirming behavioral information and the limits on social class schema effects. Using a Bayesian model of social perception, it was found that unambiguous, relevant stimulus information influenced judgments. Although social class information did not affect relevant stimulus information, it did sway judgments in…

  10. Legal Sentience and the Problem of the Instant: A Critical Assessment of the Temporal Structure of Precedent and its Implications for Legal Authority

    OpenAIRE

    Wargan, Pawel

    2015-01-01

    This paper assesses the authority of precedent from a phenomenological standpoint. Phenomenology distinguishes between two temporal models. One describes time in an idealised form, as a divisible chain of instants or events. The other looks at lived temporality as fluid and indivisible duration. In the system of precedent, we witness an interaction of both models. The legal order is constructed from slices in time that become the building blocks of future judgments. Precedents are binding for...

  11. Emotion and decision making.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lerner, Jennifer S; Li, Ye; Valdesolo, Piercarlo; Kassam, Karim S

    2015-01-03

    A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes beneficial drivers of decision making. Across different domains, important regularities appear in the mechanisms through which emotions influence judgments and choices. We organize and analyze what has been learned from the past 35 years of work on emotion and decision making. In so doing, we propose the emotion-imbued choice model, which accounts for inputs from traditional rational choice theory and from newer emotion research, synthesizing scientific models.

  12. The spatial frequencies influence the aesthetic judgment of buildings transculturally.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vannucci, Manila; Gori, Simone; Kojima, Haruyuki

    2014-01-01

    Recent evidence has shown that buildings designed to be high-ranking, according to the Western architectural decorum, have more impact on the minds of their beholders than low-ranking buildings. Here we investigated whether and how the aesthetic judgment for high- and low-ranking buildings was affected by differences in cultural expertise and by power spectrum differences. A group of Italian and Japanese participants performed aesthetic judgment tasks, with line drawings of high- and low-ranking buildings and with their random-phase versions (an image with the exact power spectrum of the original one but non-recognizable anymore). Irrespective of cultural expertise, high-ranking buildings and their relative random-phase versions received higher aesthetic judgments than low-ranking buildings and their random-phase versions. These findings indicate that high- and low-ranking buildings are differentiated for their aesthetic value and they show that low-level visual processes influence the aesthetic judgment based on differences in the stimuli power spectrum, irrespective of the influence of cultural expertise.

  13. Public judgments of information in a diazepam patient package insert.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fisher, S; Mansbridge, B; Lankford, D A

    1982-06-01

    As part of a larger study of the effects of giving patients written take-home information with prescription medications, a "patient package insert" (PPI) for diazepam was prepared based on content determined by "experts." This report compares the experts' judgments of what information should be included with judgments obtained from the public. Information judged to be most important for inclusion in a PPI was identified by having subjects sort cards containing facts about diazepam. Subjects who had previously used diazepam were no different in their judgments than inexperienced subjects. In general, there was a high degree of concordance between public and expert judgments and also a remarkably strong consensus across very different demographic samples. In those few instances of disagreement, the public attached even greater importance to warnings and "bad news" about diazepam than to information providing reassurances, benign general education, and "good news." To what extent patients would effectively use this information--whether conveyed by PPIs or alternative educational routes--must await empirical evaluation.

  14. Concurrent Dynamics of Category Learning and Metacognitive Judgments

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Valnea Žauhar

    2016-09-01

    Full Text Available In two experiments, we examined the correspondence between the dynamics of metacognitive judgments and classification accuracy when participants were asked to learn category structures of different levels of complexity, i.e., to learn tasks of types I, II and III according to Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961. The stimuli were simple geometrical figures varying in the following three dimensions: color, shape, and size. In Experiment 1, we found moderate positive correlations between confidence and accuracy in task type II and weaker correlation in task type I and III. Moreover, the trend analysis in the backward learning curves revealed that there is a non-linear trend in accuracy for all three task types, but the same trend was observed in confidence for the task type I and II but not for task type III. In Experiment 2, we found that the feeling-of-warmth judgments (FOWs showed moderate positive correlation with accuracy in all task types. Trend analysis revealed a similar non-linear component in accuracy and metacognitive judgments in task type II and III but not in task type I. Our results suggest that FOWs are a more sensitive measure of the progress of learning than confidence because FOWs capture global knowledge about the category structure, while confidence judgments are given at the level of an individual exemplar.

  15. The role of social comparison in social judgments of dental appearance: An experimental study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Al-Kharboush, Ghada H; Asimakopoulou, Koula; AlJabaa, AlJazi H; Newton, J Tim

    2017-06-01

    The objective of this study was to examine the influence of social comparison on social judgments of dental malalignment in a sample of females. In a Repeated measures design, N=218 female participants of which N=128 were orthodontic patients (mean age 31.4) and N=90 controls (mean age 26.1) rated their satisfaction with their facial appearance after viewing stereotypically beautiful images of faces (experimental condition) or houses (neutral condition). After 4-6 weeks participants returned to view an image of a female with severe crowding and were asked to make judgments of social competence (SC), intellectual ability (IA), psychological adjustment (PA) and attractiveness (A). The comparison of social judgments between high comparers (High SocComp) and low comparers (Low SocComp) was not statistically significant; (SC (t (204)=0.30, p=0.76), IA (t (204)=0.14, p=0.89) PA (t (204)=0.004, p=0.996), A (t(204)=1.26, (p=0.209). However, dentally induced social judgments (DISJ) was statistically significant in the clinical sample than the non-clinical sample SC (t (204)=0.784, p=0.434), IA (t (204)=0.2.15, p=0.033) PA (t (204)=-0.003, p=0.997) A (t (204)=1.58, p=0.116). Social comparison has little impact on DISJ. However, there are differences in DISJs between individuals who seek treatment for their malocclusion versus the nonclinical population; the reason for this is unclear but does not appear to be the result of adoption of societal standards of beauty and instead suggests individual ranking of important 'beauty areas' may play a role. This paper uses social comparison theory to investigate the basis of judgments in regards to dental appearance. The findings of this research may help to identify individuals who are more susceptible to societal pressures towards non-ideal dentitions. This will help clinicians become more aware of the patient's comparison orientation, which seems to have an impact on satisfaction with treatment outcomes. This study may form the

  16. Damage to Broca’s area OR the anterior temporal lobe is implicated in stroke-induced agrammatic comprehension: it depends on the task

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Corianne Rogalsky

    2015-04-01

    Full Text Available The neurobiology of sentence comprehension remains unresolved. Previous large-scale studies of stroke patients have yielded conflicting results regarding sentence comprehension, implicating inferior frontal, anterior temporal and/or posterior temporal regions (Dronkers et al., 2004; Magnusdottir et al., 2013; Thothathiri et al. 2012. Furthermore, only one large-scale lesion study (Magnusdottir et al. 2013 has examined the neural underpinnings of agrammatic comprehension (i.e. substantially worse performance on sentences with noncanonical word orders compared to canonical word order sentences in English, a hallmark of Broca’s aphasia. This one previous study of noncanonical < canonical sentence performance on a sentence picture-matching task implicated damage to the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL and to a lesser degree Broca’s area damage (i.e. < 10% of significant voxels (Magnusdottir et al. 2013. The present study investigated the neurobiology of agrammatic comprehension with two sentence comprehension tasks in the MARC test battery: a sentence-picture matching task (the SOAP Test: a test of syntactic complexity; Love & Oster, 2002 and a sentence plausibility judgment task. Each task contained active, passive, subject-relative and object-relative sentences. Participants included 91 patients with chronic focal cerebral damage. First, we conducted voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates et al. 2003 for each sentence type in each task. Consistent with previous studies (Magnusdottir et al. 2013; Thothathiri et al. 2012, the VLSMs identified a significant association between sentence comprehension impairments and damage to a large left temporal-inferior parietal network for all sentences (peak t values were in posterior temporal and inferior parietal voxels; no areas of frontal lobe damage were significant for any sentence type/task. We then conducted VLSMs to identify areas of damage associated specifically with agrammatic

  17. The Influence of Contextual Cues in Judgment Formation: An Ecologically Valid Test.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jacoby, Jacob; Galak, Jeff

    2016-01-01

    An ecologically valid experiment investigated the propositions that (a) people's judgments are influenced by contextual cues, (b) that they are often unaware that those cues influenced them, and (c) that even when they know the cues should influence them, they do not readily incorporate those cues into their judgment formation. After participating in a realistic simulation of a shopping experience, 405 consumers made judgments about whether the product they examined contained fresh or preserved grapefruit sections. Our findings show that despite being aware that contextual cues (such as the location within a store where the product is sold, the type of container it is sold in, and whether the container is chilled or not) generally influence the judgment at hand, people generally fail to realize that their specific judgments were influenced at all. These findings replicate prior studies, thereby extending the generalizability and robustness of prior research.

  18. CONCEPTUAL AND REGULATORY DELIMITATIONS OF THE PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT WITHIN AN ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Viorica Mirela ȘTEFAN-DUICU

    2017-05-01

    Full Text Available The professional judgment is a base concept “sine-qua-non” within a company because it displays the intrinsic attribute for performing the activity. In our accepting, bringing together the determinant factors of the professional judgment and also the universality of the component parts and the influences oriented on the professional judgment we obtain an ample professional characterial result for which we propose the title of “spectral value of the professional judgment”. Through this paper we aim to describe the classical component of the professional judgment and also the secondary elements that we have built at a conceptual and original level starting from the base notions presented.

  19. Using the method of judgement analysis to address variations in diagnostic decision making

    OpenAIRE

    Hancock, Helen C; Mason, James M; Murphy, Jerry J

    2012-01-01

    Abstract Background Heart failure is not a clear-cut diagnosis but a complex clinical syndrome with consequent diagnostic uncertainty. Judgment analysis is a method to help clinical teams to understand how they make complex decisions. The method of judgment analysis was used to determine the factors that influence clinicians' diagnostic decisions about heart failure. Methods Three consultants, three middle grade doctors, and two junior doctors each evaluated 45 patient scenarios. The main out...

  20. Perception through a Perspective-Taking Lens: Differential Effects on Judgment and Behavior

    OpenAIRE

    Ku , Gillian; Wang , Cynthia S.; Galinsky , Adam D.

    2010-01-01

    International audience; In contrast to the view that social perception has symmetric effects on judgments and behavior, the current research explored whether perspective-taking leads stereotypes to differentially affect judgments and behavior. Across three studies, perspective-takers consistently used stereotypes more in their own behavior while simultaneously using them less in their judgments of others. After writing about an African American, perspective-taking tendencies were positively c...

  1. The Effects Of Feedback And Selected Personality Variables On Aesthetic Judgment

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stallings, William M.; And Others

    1973-01-01

    This present study is an attempt to investigate the extent to which knowledge of results in various forms (true, none, and false) may modify aesthetic judgment in "typical" (with respect to aesthetic judgment) students. (Author)

  2. Stability in the metamemory realism of eyewitness confidence judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Buratti, Sandra; Allwood, Carl Martin; Johansson, Marcus

    2014-02-01

    The stability of eyewitness confidence judgments over time in regard to their reported memory and accuracy of these judgments is of interest in forensic contexts because witnesses are often interviewed many times. The present study investigated the stability of the confidence judgments of memory reports of a witnessed event and of the accuracy of these judgments over three occasions, each separated by 1 week. Three age groups were studied: younger children (8-9 years), older children (10-11 years), and adults (19-31 years). A total of 93 participants viewed a short film clip and were asked to answer directed two-alternative forced-choice questions about the film clip and to confidence judge each answer. Different questions about details in the film clip were used on each of the three test occasions. Confidence as such did not exhibit stability over time on an individual basis. However, the difference between confidence and proportion correct did exhibit stability across time, in terms of both over/underconfidence and calibration. With respect to age, the adults and older children exhibited more stability than the younger children for calibration. Furthermore, some support for instability was found with respect to the difference between the average confidence level for correct and incorrect answers (slope). Unexpectedly, however, the younger children's slope was found to be more stable than the adults. Compared to the previous research, the present study's use of more advanced statistical methods provides a more nuanced understanding of the stability of confidence judgments in the eyewitness reports of children and adults.

  3. Decision making in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Labudda, Kirsten; Frigge, Kristina; Horstmann, Simone; Aengenendt, Joerg; Woermann, Friedrich G; Ebner, Alois; Markowitsch, Hans J; Brand, Matthias

    2009-01-01

    The mesiotemporal lobe is involved in decision making processes because bilateral amygdala damage can cause impairments in decision making that is mainly based on the processing of emotional feedback. In addition to executive functions, previous studies have suggested the involvement of feedback processing in decision making under risk when explicit information about consequences and their probabilities is provided. In the current study, we investigated whether unilateral mesiotemporal damage, comprising of the hippocampus and/or the amygdala, results in alterations of both kinds of decision making. For this purpose, we preoperatively examined 20 patients with refractory unilateral mesiotemporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and a comparison group (CG) of 20 healthy volunteers with the Iowa Gambling Task to assess decision making based on feedback processing, the Game of Dice Task to assess decision making under risk, and with a neuropsychological test battery. Results indicate that TLE patients performed normally in decision making under risk, but can exhibit disturbances in decision making on the Iowa Gambling Task. A subgroup analysis revealed that those patients with a preference for the disadvantageous alternatives performed worse on executive subcomponents and had seizure onset at an earlier age in comparison to the patient subgroup without disadvantageous decision making. Furthermore, disadvantageous decision making can emerge in patients with selective hippocampal sclerosis not extended to the amygdala. Thus, our results demonstrate for the first time that presurgical patients with TLE can have selective reductions in decision making and that these deficits can result from hippocampal lesions without structural amygdala abnormalities.

  4. Judgments of and by Representativeness

    Science.gov (United States)

    1981-05-15

    p. 4i). This hy- pothesis was studied in several contexts, including intuitive statisti- cal judgments and the prediction of professional choice (Kahneman... professional choice . Here, X is representative of M either because it is frequently associated with M (e.g., high fever commonly accompanies pneumonia

  5. Children's developing metaethical judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schmidt, Marco F H; Gonzalez-Cabrera, Ivan; Tomasello, Michael

    2017-12-01

    Human adults incline toward moral objectivism but may approach things more relativistically if different cultures are involved. In this study, 4-, 6-, and 9-year-old children (N=136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judge (e.g., judging that it is wrong to do X) and an antinormative judge (e.g., judging that it is okay to do X). We assessed children's metaethical judgment, that is, whether they judged that only one party (objectivism) or both parties (relativism) could be right. We found that 9-year-olds, but not younger children, were more likely to judge that both parties could be right when a normative ingroup judge disagreed with an antinormative extraterrestrial judge (with different preferences and background) than when the antinormative judge was another ingroup individual. This effect was not found in a comparison case where parties disagreed about the possibility of different physical laws. These findings suggest that although young children often exhibit moral objectivism, by early school age they begin to temper their objectivism with culturally relative metaethical judgments. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  6. Aging and Parkinson's disease as functional models of temporal order perception.

    Science.gov (United States)

    da Silva, Carolina Feher; Morgero, Kelly Cristina Silva; Mota, Amanda Manzini; Piemonte, Maria Elisa Pimentel; Baldo, Marcus Vinícius Chrysóstomo

    2015-11-01

    Our study evaluates how aging and Parkinson's disease (PD) alter temporal order judgment (TOJ). Two TOJ experiments were performed with young participants, healthy elderly participants, and PD patients. Two white squares were presented on opposite sides of a screen and participants responded which appeared first. In Experiment 1, it was assessed how accurately each group could judge temporal order at intervals from 0ms to 167ms. Detectability, the capacity of detecting which stimulus appeared first, was measured. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to orient their attention to the hemifield indicated by a cue. The PSS ("point of subjective simultaneity"), where the participant was equally likely to respond that either stimulus appeared first, was measured. In Experiment 1, PD patients had smaller detectability than healthy elderly (pnoise ratio in the visual pathways. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  7. 'Utilitarian' judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kahane, Guy; Everett, Jim A C; Earp, Brian D; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian

    2015-01-01

    A growing body of research has focused on so-called 'utilitarian' judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such 'utilitarian' judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear. Across four studies, we investigated the relationship between 'utilitarian' judgment in such sacrificial dilemmas and a range of traits, attitudes, judgments and behaviors that either reflect or reject an impartial concern for the greater good of all. In Study 1, we found that rates of 'utilitarian' judgment were associated with a broadly immoral outlook concerning clear ethical transgressions in a business context, as well as with sub-clinical psychopathy. In Study 2, we found that 'utilitarian' judgment was associated with greater endorsement of rational egoism, less donation of money to a charity, and less identification with the whole of humanity, a core feature of classical utilitarianism. In Studies 3 and 4, we found no association between 'utilitarian' judgments in sacrificial dilemmas and characteristic utilitarian judgments relating to assistance to distant people in need, self-sacrifice and impartiality, even when the utilitarian justification for these judgments was made explicit and unequivocal. This lack of association remained even when we controlled for the antisocial element in 'utilitarian' judgment. Taken together, these results suggest that there is very little relation between sacrificial judgments in the hypothetical dilemmas that dominate current research, and a genuine utilitarian approach to ethics. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  8. The psychology of martyrdom: making the ultimate sacrifice in the name of a cause.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bélanger, Jocelyn J; Caouette, Julie; Sharvit, Keren; Dugas, Michelle

    2014-09-01

    Martyrdom is defined as the psychological readiness to suffer and sacrifice one's life for a cause. An integrative set of 8 studies investigated the concept of martyrdom by creating a new tool to quantitatively assess individuals' propensity toward self-sacrifice. Studies 1A-1C consisted of psychometric work attesting to the scale's unidimensionality, internal consistency, and temporal stability while examining its nomological network. Studies 2A-2B focused on the scale's predictive validity, especially as it relates to extreme behaviors and suicidal terrorism. Studies 3-5 focused on the influence of self-sacrifice on automatic decision making, costly and altruistic behaviors, and morality judgments. Results involving more than 2,900 participants from different populations, including a terrorist sample, supported the proposed conceptualization of martyrdom and demonstrated its importance for a vast repertoire of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral phenomena. Implications and future directions for the psychology of terrorism are discussed. 2014 APA, all rights reserved

  9. Eliciting and communicating expert judgments: methodology and application to nuclear safety

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Winterfeldt, D. von; Commission of the European Communities, Ispra

    1989-01-01

    Expert judgment has always been used informally in the analysis of complex engineering problems. Increasingly, however, the use of expert judgment has been formalized by eliciting judgments in an explicit, documented and often quantitative way. In nuclear safety studies the need for formal elicitation of expert judgments arises because of the lack of data and experiences, the need to adapt model results to the specific circumstances of a plant, and the large uncertainties surrounding the events and quantities that characterize an accident sequence. The recognition of the need for a formal elicitation of expert judgments has led to one of the most extensive expert elicitation processes to date in the context of the NUREG 1150 study. About 30 safety issues were quantified using expert judgments about probabilities of various uncertain events and quantities, ranging from the failure of a check valve in the cooling system to the pressure built up due to hydrogen production to release fractions of various radionuclides. In total, some 1000 probability distributions were elicited from some 50 experts. This paper first motivates the use of formal expert elicitation in complex engineering studies and describes the methodology of formal expert elicitation. Subsequently, it describes the overall approach of NUREG 1150 and provides an example of the elicitation of the probability of a bypass failure in a pressurized water reactor. The paper ends by discussing some lessons learned, problems encountered and by providing some recommendations

  10. Music for a Brighter World: Brightness Judgment Bias by Musical Emotion.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Joydeep Bhattacharya

    Full Text Available A prevalent conceptual metaphor is the association of the concepts of good and evil with brightness and darkness, respectively. Music cognition, like metaphor, is possibly embodied, yet no study has addressed the question whether musical emotion can modulate brightness judgment in a metaphor consistent fashion. In three separate experiments, participants judged the brightness of a grey square that was presented after a short excerpt of emotional music. The results of Experiment 1 showed that short musical excerpts are effective emotional primes that cross-modally influence brightness judgment of visual stimuli. Grey squares were consistently judged as brighter after listening to music with a positive valence, as compared to music with a negative valence. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that the bias in brightness judgment does not require an active evaluation of the emotional content of the music. By applying a different experimental procedure in Experiment 3, we showed that this brightness judgment bias is indeed a robust effect. Altogether, our findings demonstrate a powerful role of musical emotion in biasing brightness judgment and that this bias is aligned with the metaphor viewpoint.

  11. Sidetracked by trolleys: Why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little (or nothing) about utilitarian judgment

    OpenAIRE

    Kahane, Guy

    2015-01-01

    Research into moral decision-making has been dominated by sacrificial dilemmas where, in order to save several lives, it is necessary to sacrifice the life of another person. It is widely assumed that these dilemmas draw a sharp contrast between utilitarian and deontological approaches to morality, and thereby enable us to study the psychological and neural basis of utilitarian judgment. However, it has been previously shown that some sacrificial dilemmas fail to present a genuine contrast be...

  12. Attitude of Nigerian courts to the enforcement of foreign judgments ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    ... serious need of reform. The study therefore called on the Nigerian Minister of Justice to do the needful so that the position of the law as it pertains to the enforcement of foreign judgment in Nigeria will be well settled and devoid of ambiguity. Keywords: Foreign Judgment, Enforcement, Registration, Recognition, Commerce ...

  13. Language as Context Modulates Social Judgments

    Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

    Shan Gao; Zhao Gao; Ting Gou

    2017-01-01

    Social judgments are usually made in the context of complex information including verbal cues. Here we investigated the impact of verbal statements on social judgments by biasing male and female neutral faces with descriptives of differentially-valenced behaviour (criticizing or praising) targeting others or objects. Results showed significant main effects of valence and target, such that critical individuals were rated lower in likeability than praising ones and those targeting others relative to objects were valued less. In particular, those who criticized others were the most unlikeable. Among critical individuals, men were less likeable than women. Similarly, men became less valued while targeting others. Overall these findings suggest that the negative impact of critical attributes may trigger avoidance in social interaction while the positive impact of praise may trigger approach.

  14. Risk assessment and multi-criteria decision-making

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Segerstaahl, Boris

    1989-01-01

    Risk assessment and analysis is connected to the policy framework used in decision-making on issues concerning technological risk. A review of the problems created by different views concerning the fundamental structure of risk concepts is used as a way to describe the structure of risk assessment studies as used in decision-making. The fundamental difference between judgments based on assessments and on perceptions is analyzed in order to explain the dynamics of the decision making process. A proposed effort to study the energy sector as a dynamic endless game implementing a mixed strategy is suggested. (author)

  15. The curious anomaly of skewed judgment distributions and systematic error in the wisdom of crowds.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ulrik W Nash

    Full Text Available Judgment distributions are often skewed and we know little about why. This paper explains the phenomenon of skewed judgment distributions by introducing the augmented quincunx (AQ model of sequential and probabilistic cue categorization by neurons of judges. In the process of developing inferences about true values, when neurons categorize cues better than chance, and when the particular true value is extreme compared to what is typical and anchored upon, then populations of judges form skewed judgment distributions with high probability. Moreover, the collective error made by these people can be inferred from how skewed their judgment distributions are, and in what direction they tilt. This implies not just that judgment distributions are shaped by cues, but that judgment distributions are cues themselves for the wisdom of crowds. The AQ model also predicts that judgment variance correlates positively with collective error, thereby challenging what is commonly believed about how diversity and collective intelligence relate. Data from 3053 judgment surveys about US macroeconomic variables obtained from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Wall Street Journal provide strong support, and implications are discussed with reference to three central ideas on collective intelligence, these being Galton's conjecture on the distribution of judgments, Muth's rational expectations hypothesis, and Page's diversity prediction theorem.

  16. NATO Guide for Judgement-Based Operational Analysis in Defence Decision Making : Executive Leaflet

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Wijnmalen, D.J.D.; et al

    2012-01-01

    Judgment plays an important role in all Operational Analysis (OA). NATO practitioners have determined that approaches in OA that are based on human judgement are increasingly critical to defence decision making. The purpose of the NATO Guide for Judgement-Based OA in Defence Decision Making is to

  17. Role of the medial temporal lobes in relational memory: Neuropsychological evidence from a cued recognition paradigm

    OpenAIRE

    Kan, Irene P.; Giovanello, Kelly S.; Schnyer, David M.; Makris, Nikos; Verfaellie, Mieke

    2007-01-01

    In this study, we examined the role of the hippocampus in relational memory by comparing item recognition performance in amnesic patients with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage and their matched controls. Specifically, we investigated the contribution of associative memory to item recognition using a cued recognition paradigm. Control subjects studied cue-target pairs once, whereas amnesic patients studied cue-target pairs six times. Following study, subjects made recognition judgments about ...

  18. Respecting an Individual's Privacy Critical in Making Difficult Journalistic Judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Adams, Julian

    1984-01-01

    Discusses the criteria of "newsworthy" regarding news reporting and the right to privacy. Examines the thin line between what is legal and what is ethical to print and some components of the law to consider when making such decisions. (HTH)

  19. How Large Is the Role of Emotion in Judgments of Moral Dilemmas?

    OpenAIRE

    Horne, Zachary; Powell, Derek

    2016-01-01

    Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judgments about moral dilemmas has recently been called into question. In the present studies, we reexam...

  20. 'Errors of Judgment': The Case of Pain Sensations | Loonat | South ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Hill, in his paper 'Introspective Awareness of Sensations', argues that we do sometimes commit 'errors of judgment' and he draws on an example that involves the perception of pain to illustrate his point. I analyze Hill's example and draw on other examples of pain sensations to show how errors of judgment are not possible.

  1. Temporal contingency.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gallistel, C R; Craig, Andrew R; Shahan, Timothy A

    2014-01-01

    Contingency, and more particularly temporal contingency, has often figured in thinking about the nature of learning. However, it has never been formally defined in such a way as to make it a measure that can be applied to most animal learning protocols. We use elementary information theory to define contingency in such a way as to make it a measurable property of almost any conditioning protocol. We discuss how making it a measurable construct enables the exploration of the role of different contingencies in the acquisition and performance of classically and operantly conditioned behavior. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  2. Temporal contingency

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gallistel, C.R.; Craig, Andrew R.; Shahan, Timothy A.

    2015-01-01

    Contingency, and more particularly temporal contingency, has often figured in thinking about the nature of learning. However, it has never been formally defined in such a way as to make it a measure that can be applied to most animal learning protocols. We use elementary information theory to define contingency in such a way as to make it a measurable property of almost any conditioning protocol. We discuss how making it a measurable construct enables the exploration of the role of different contingencies in the acquisition and performance of classically and operantly conditioned behavior. PMID:23994260

  3. Swiss identity smells like chocolate: Social identity shapes olfactory judgments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Coppin, Géraldine; Pool, Eva; Delplanque, Sylvain; Oud, Bastiaan; Margot, Christian; Sander, David; Van Bavel, Jay J.

    2016-01-01

    There is extensive evidence that social identities can shape people’s attitudes and behavior, but what about sensory judgments? We examined the possibility that social identity concerns may also shape the judgment of non-social properties—namely, olfactory judgment. In two experiments, we presented Swiss and non-Swiss participants with the odor of chocolate, for which Switzerland is world-famous, and a control odor (popcorn). Swiss participants primed with Swiss identity reported the odor of chocolate (but not popcorn) as more intense than non-Swiss participants (Experiments 1 and 2) and than Swiss participants primed with individual identity or not primed (Experiment 2). The self-reported intensity of chocolate smell tended to increase as identity accessibility increased—but only among Swiss participants (Experiment 1). These results suggest that identity priming can counter-act classic sensory habituation effects, allowing identity-relevant smells to maintain their intensity after repeated presentations. This suggests that social identity dynamically influences sensory judgment. We discuss the potential implications for models of social identity and chemosensory perception. PMID:27725715

  4. Generating human reliability estimates using expert judgment. Volume 2. Appendices

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Comer, M.K.; Seaver, D.A.; Stillwell, W.G.; Gaddy, C.D.

    1984-11-01

    The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is conducting a research program to determine the practicality, acceptability, and usefulness of several different methods for obtaining human reliability data and estimates that can be used in nuclear power plant probabilistic risk assessments (PRA). One method, investigated as part of this overall research program, uses expert judgment to generate human error probability (HEP) estimates and associated uncertainty bounds. The project described in this document evaluated two techniques for using expert judgment: paired comparisons and direct numerical estimation. Volume 2 provides detailed procedures for using the techniques, detailed descriptions of the analyses performed to evaluate the techniques, and HEP estimates generated as part of this project. The results of the evaluation indicate that techniques using expert judgment should be given strong consideration for use in developing HEP estimates. Judgments were shown to be consistent and to provide HEP estimates with a good degree of convergent validity. Of the two techniques tested, direct numerical estimation appears to be preferable in terms of ease of application and quality of results

  5. Swiss identity smells like chocolate: Social identity shapes olfactory judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Coppin, Géraldine; Pool, Eva; Delplanque, Sylvain; Oud, Bastiaan; Margot, Christian; Sander, David; Van Bavel, Jay J

    2016-10-11

    There is extensive evidence that social identities can shape people's attitudes and behavior, but what about sensory judgments? We examined the possibility that social identity concerns may also shape the judgment of non-social properties-namely, olfactory judgment. In two experiments, we presented Swiss and non-Swiss participants with the odor of chocolate, for which Switzerland is world-famous, and a control odor (popcorn). Swiss participants primed with Swiss identity reported the odor of chocolate (but not popcorn) as more intense than non-Swiss participants (Experiments 1 and 2) and than Swiss participants primed with individual identity or not primed (Experiment 2). The self-reported intensity of chocolate smell tended to increase as identity accessibility increased-but only among Swiss participants (Experiment 1). These results suggest that identity priming can counter-act classic sensory habituation effects, allowing identity-relevant smells to maintain their intensity after repeated presentations. This suggests that social identity dynamically influences sensory judgment. We discuss the potential implications for models of social identity and chemosensory perception.

  6. Temporal Representation in Semantic Graphs

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Levandoski, J J; Abdulla, G M

    2007-08-07

    A wide range of knowledge discovery and analysis applications, ranging from business to biological, make use of semantic graphs when modeling relationships and concepts. Most of the semantic graphs used in these applications are assumed to be static pieces of information, meaning temporal evolution of concepts and relationships are not taken into account. Guided by the need for more advanced semantic graph queries involving temporal concepts, this paper surveys the existing work involving temporal representations in semantic graphs.

  7. [Implicit value judgments in the measurement of health inequalities].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harper, Sam; King, Nicholas B; Meersman, Stephen C; E Reichman, Marsha; Breen, Nancy; Lynch, John

    2014-04-01

    Quantitative estimates of the magnitude, direction, and rate of change of health inequalities play a crucial role in creating and assessing policies aimed at eliminating the disproportionate burden of disease in disadvantaged populations. It is generally assumed that the measurement of health inequalities is a value-neutral process, providing objective data that are then interpreted using normative judgments about whether a particular distribution of health is just, fair, or socially acceptable. We discuss five examples in which normative judgments play a role in the measurement process itself, through either the selection of one measurement strategy to the exclusion of others or the selection of the type, significance, or weight assigned to the variables being measured. Overall, we find that many commonly used measures of inequality are value laden and that the normative judgments implicit in these measures have important consequences for interpreting and responding to health inequalities. Because values implicit in the generation of health inequality measures may lead to radically different interpretations of the same underlying data,we urge researchers to explicitly consider and transparently discuss the normative judgments underlying their measures. We also urge policymakers and other consumers of health inequalities data to pay close attention to the measures on which they base their assessments of current and future health policies.

  8. Implicit value judgments in the measurement of health inequalities.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harper, Sam; King, Nicholas B; Meersman, Stephen C; Reichman, Marsha E; Breen, Nancy; Lynch, John

    2010-03-01

    Quantitative estimates of the magnitude, direction, and rate of change of health inequalities play a crucial role in creating and assessing policies aimed at eliminating the disproportionate burden of disease in disadvantaged populations. It is generally assumed that the measurement of health inequalities is a value-neutral process, providing objective data that are then interpreted using normative judgments about whether a particular distribution of health is just, fair, or socially acceptable. We discuss five examples in which normative judgments play a role in the measurement process itself, through either the selection of one measurement strategy to the exclusion of others or the selection of the type, significance, or weight assigned to the variables being measured. Overall, we find that many commonly used measures of inequality are value laden and that the normative judgments implicit in these measures have important consequences for interpreting and responding to health inequalities. Because values implicit in the generation of health inequality measures may lead to radically different interpretations of the same underlying data, we urge researchers to explicitly consider and transparently discuss the normative judgments underlying their measures. We also urge policymakers and other consumers of health inequalities data to pay close attention to the measures on which they base their assessments of current and future health policies.

  9. Quantity judgments in the context of risk/reward decision making in striped field mice: first “count,” then hunt

    Science.gov (United States)

    Panteleeva, Sofia; Reznikova, Zhanna; Vygonyailova, Olga

    2013-01-01

    We simulated the situation of risky hunting in the striped field mouse Apodemus agrarius in order to examine whether these animals are able to make a choice between small and large quantities of live prey (ants). In the first (preliminary) experiment we investigated to what extent mice were interested in ants as a live prey and how their hunting activity depended on the quantity of these edible but rather aggressive insects. We placed mice one by one into arenas together with ant groups of different quantities, from 10 to 60. Surprisingly, animals, both wild-caught and laboratory-reared, displayed rather skilled predatory attacks: mice killed and ate from 0.37 ± 003 to 4 ± 0.5 ants per minute. However, there was a threshold number of ants in the arenas when rodents expressed signs of discomfort and started to panic, likely because ants bit them. This threshold corresponds to the dynamic density (about 400 individuals per m2 per min) in the vicinity of anthills and ants' routes in natural environment. In the second experiment mice had to choose between different quantities of ants placed in two transparent tunnels. Ants here served both as food items and as a source of danger. As far as we know, this is the first experimental paradigm based on evaluation of quantity judgments in the context of risk/reward decision making where the animals face a trade-off between the hedonistic value of the prey and the danger it presents. We found that when mice have to choose between 5 vs. 15, 5 vs. 30, and 10 vs. 30 ants, they always tend to prefer the smaller quantity, thus displaying the capacity for distinguishing more from less in order to ensure comfortable hunting. The results of this study are ecologically relevant as they reflect situations and challenges faced by free-living small rodents. PMID:23407476

  10. Relativism, Objectivity and Moral Judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Partington, Geoffrey

    1979-01-01

    Reaction against the naive moral absolutism of past historical writing has frequently led to unconditional moral and cultural relativism which is equally dangerous. A viable solution is contingent relativism in historical judgments, combining explicit and examinable criteria of human values and concern for contexts of time and place. (Author/SJL)

  11. Evidence for a neural correlate of a framing effect: bias-specific activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex during credibility judgments.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Deppe, M; Schwindt, W; Krämer, J; Kugel, H; Plassmann, H; Kenning, P; Ringelstein, E B

    2005-11-15

    Neural processes within the medial prefrontal cortex play a crucial role in assessing and integrating emotional and other implicit information during decision-making. Phylogenetically, it was important for the individual to assess the relevance of all kinds of environmental stimuli in order to adapt behavior in a flexible manner. Consequently, we can in principle not exclude that environmental information covertly influences the evaluation of actually decision relevant facts ("framing effect"). To test the hypothesis that the medial prefrontal cortex is involved into a framing effect we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a binary credibility judgment task. Twenty-one subjects were asked to judge 30 normalized news magazine headlines by forced answers as "true" or "false". To confound the judgments by formally irrelevant framing information we presented each of the headlines in four different news magazines characterized by varying credibility. For each subject the susceptibility to the judgment confounder (framing information) was assessed by magazine-specific modifications of the answers given. We could show that individual activity changes of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex during the judgments correlate with the degree of an individual's susceptibility to the framing information. We found (i) a neural correlate of a framing effect as postulated by behavioral decision theorists that (ii) reflects interindividual differences in the degree of the susceptibility to framing information.

  12. The effect of attribute order on judgment in Chinese and English.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tavassoli, Nader T; Lee, Yih Hwai

    2004-12-01

    The authors found that the order of attribute presentation had a stronger effect on judgment in English than in Chinese. In Experiment 1, with a sample of 102 female and 63 male bilingual Singaporeans, the authors found that participants' memory-based judgments showed a stronger primacy effect in English than in Chinese that was mediated by recall from long-term memory. In contrast, participants' online (immediate) judgments showed a primacy effect in both languages that was unmediated by recall from short-term memory. In Experiment 2, with a sample of 67 female and 53 male bilingual Singaporeans, the authors found that participants' online judgments were more influenced by the attribute order of a previously seen competitive advertisement in English than in Chinese. A cross-cultural field study in Mainland China and the United Kingdom provided external validity for the experimental results. copyright (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved.

  13. Do Ethical Judgments Depend on the Type of Response Scale? Comparing Acceptability versus Unacceptability Judgments in the Case of Life-Ending Procedures

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Etienne Mullet

    2010-01-01

    Full Text Available Using Functional Measurement (Anderson, 2008, Frileux, Lelièvre, Muñoz Sastre, Mullet, and Sorum (2003 examined the joint impact of several key factors on lay people's judgments of the acceptability of physicians' interventions to end patients' lives. The level of acceptability was high, and the information integration rule that best described the participants' judgments was Acceptability = Patient's Request + Patient's Age + Residual Suffering + Incurability. Critics suggested, however, that acceptability was high because the ethical problem was framed in terms of acceptability (Murphy, 2007. Presenting participants with acceptability scales may have caused the life-ending procedure to be represented in participants' mind as basically "acceptable". By contrast, presenting participants with unacceptability scales might cause the procedure to be represented as basically "unacceptable". In the present study, therefore, we directly compared lay people's judgments of the acceptability of life-ending procedures under two opposite conditions - an acceptability condition, and an unacceptability condition. The life-ending procedure did not appear as more acceptable to participants responding in terms of acceptability than to those responding in terms of unacceptability. In addition, the impacts of the factors describing the end-of-life situations were not affected by the type of judgment scale that was used. Functional Measurement seems to be resistant to goal-framing effects; the findings that have been observed using acceptability scales can be considered as robust.

  14. The Scope of Our Affective Influences: When and How Naturally Occurring Positive, Negative, and Neutral Affects Alter Judgment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gasper, Karen; Danube, Cinnamon L

    2016-03-01

    To determine how naturally arising affect alters judgment, we examined whether (a) affective states exert a specific, rather than a general, influence on valenced-specific judgments; (b) neutral affect is associated with increased neutral judgments, independent of positive, negative, and ambivalent affects, and whether neutral judgments are associated with behavioral disengagement; and (c) the informational value of naturally arising states may be difficult to alter via salience and relevance manipulations. The results support several conclusions: (a) Affective states exerted a judgment-specific effect-positive affect was most strongly associated with positive judgments, negative affect with negative judgments, and neutral affect with neutral judgments. (b) Neutral affect influenced judgments, taking into account positive, negative, and ambivalent affects; and neutral judgments predicted behavioral disengagement. (c) With the exception of negative affect, naturally arising affective states typically influenced judgments regardless of their salience and relevance. © 2016 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

  15. Mind the gap: temporal discrimination and dystonia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sadnicka, A; Daum, C; Cordivari, C; Bhatia, K P; Rothwell, J C; Manohar, S; Edwards, M J

    2017-06-01

    One of the most widely studied perceptual measures of sensory dysfunction in dystonia is the temporal discrimination threshold (TDT) (the shortest interval at which subjects can perceive that there are two stimuli rather than one). However the elevated thresholds described may be due to a number of potential mechanisms as current paradigms test not only temporal discrimination but also extraneous sensory and decision-making parameters. In this study two paradigms designed to better quantify temporal processing are presented and a decision-making model is used to assess the influence of decision strategy. 22 patients with cervical dystonia and 22 age-matched controls completed two tasks (i) temporal resolution (a randomized, automated version of existing TDT paradigms) and (ii) interval discrimination (rating the length of two consecutive intervals). In the temporal resolution task patients had delayed (P = 0.021) and more variable (P = 0.013) response times but equivalent discrimination thresholds. Modelling these effects suggested this was due to an increased perceptual decision boundary in dystonia with patients requiring greater evidence before committing to decisions (P = 0.020). Patient performance on the interval discrimination task was normal. Our work suggests that previously observed abnormalities in TDT may not be due to a selective sensory deficit of temporal processing as decision-making itself is abnormal in cervical dystonia. © 2017 EAN.

  16. 40 CFR 59.603 - How must manufacturers apply good engineering judgment?

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... engineering judgment? 59.603 Section 59.603 Protection of Environment ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY... COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS Control of Evaporative Emissions From New and In-Use Portable Fuel Containers Overview and Applicability § 59.603 How must manufacturers apply good engineering judgment? (a) In addition to...

  17. Risk Emotions and Risk Judgments: Passive Bodily Experience and Active Moral Reasoning in Judgmental Constellations

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Coeckelbergh, Mark

    2007-01-01

    Experts typically accuse lay people of ‘emotional’ responses to technological risk as opposed to their own ‘rational’ judgment. This attitude is in tune with risk perception research that qualifies lay people’s responses in terms of bias (e.g. Slovic et. al. 2004), and with the Kantian view of

  18. Self-Judgments of Word Production Accuracy in Acquired Apraxia of Speech.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wambaugh, Julie; Shuster, Linda; Bailey, Dallin J; Mauszycki, Shannon; Kean, Jacob; Nessler, Christina; Wright, Sandra; Brunsvold, Jessica

    2016-12-01

    The ability to recognize one's own speech errors has long been considered a clinical feature of acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) despite limited empirical data supporting this notion. This study was designed to (a) investigate the ability of speakers with AOS to self-judge the accuracy of their own word productions and (b) examine the test-retest stability of a measure to quantify the self-judgments of speakers with AOS. Twenty-four speakers with AOS and aphasia repeated mono- and multisyllabic words. After each word, they indicated whether their production was correct or incorrect. This procedure was repeated 1 week later to examine performance stability. Percentage of incorrect word productions was stable for the group across times. Accuracy of judgments ranged from 64% to 100% at Time 1 and from 56% to 100% at Time 2. Inaccurate judgments of error productions (false positives) occurred much more frequently than inaccurate judgments of correct productions (false negatives). Error production was remarkably stable in our participants. As a group, the participants failed to detect almost one third of words produced erroneously. However, accuracy and stability of judgments over sampling times varied across participants. Findings suggest that error awareness might be a worthwhile target for treatment in some individuals with AOS.

  19. Topics in Probabilistic Judgment Aggregation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wang, Guanchun

    2011-01-01

    This dissertation is a compilation of several studies that are united by their relevance to probabilistic judgment aggregation. In the face of complex and uncertain events, panels of judges are frequently consulted to provide probabilistic forecasts, and aggregation of such estimates in groups often yield better results than could have been made…

  20. Thinking like a nurse: a research-based model of clinical judgment in nursing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tanner, Christine A

    2006-06-01

    This article reviews the growing body of research on clinical judgment in nursing and presents an alternative model of clinical judgment based on these studies. Based on a review of nearly 200 studies, five conclusions can be drawn: (1) Clinical judgments are more influenced by what nurses bring to the situation than the objective data about the situation at hand; (2) Sound clinical judgment rests to some degree on knowing the patient and his or her typical pattern of responses, as well as an engagement with the patient and his or her concerns; (3) Clinical judgments are influenced by the context in which the situation occurs and the culture of the nursing care unit; (4) Nurses use a variety of reasoning patterns alone or in combination; and (5) Reflection on practice is often triggered by a breakdown in clinical judgment and is critical for the development of clinical knowledge and improvement in clinical reasoning. A model based on these general conclusions emphasizes the role of nurses' background, the context of the situation, and nurses' relationship with their patients as central to what nurses notice and how they interpret findings, respond, and reflect on their response.