39,478 research outputs found

    Role Induced Bias in Court: An Experimental Analysis

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    Criminal procedure is organized as a tournament with predefined roles. We show that assuming the role of a defense counsel or prosecutor leads to role induced bias even if participants are asked to predict a court ruling after they have ceased to act in that role, and if they expect a substantial financial incentive for being accurate. The bias is not removed either if participants are instructed to predict the court ruling in preparation of plea bargaining. In line with parallel constraint satisfaction models for legal decision making, findings indicate that role induced bias is driven by coherence effects (Simon, 2004), that is, systematic information distortions in support of the favored option. This is mainly achieved by downplaying the importance of conflicting evidence. These distortions seem to stabilize interpretations, and people do not correct for this bias. Implications for legal procedure are briefly discussed.Coherence effects, Legal Decision Making, Biases, Parallel Constraint Satisfaction, Intuition

    Modeling Option and Strategy Choices with Connectionist Networks: Towards an Integrative Model of Automatic and Deliberate Decision Making

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    We claim that understanding human decisions requires that both automatic and deliberate processes be considered. First, we sketch the qualitative differences between two hypothetical processing systems, an automatic and a deliberate system. Second, we show the potential that connectionism offers for modeling processes of decision making and discuss some empirical evidence. Specifically, we posit that the integration of information and the application of a selection rule are governed by the automatic system. The deliberate system is assumed to be responsible for information search, inferences and the modification of the network that the automatic processes act on. Third, we critically evaluate the multiple-strategy approach to decision making. We introduce the basic assumption of an integrative approach stating that individuals apply an all-purpose rule for decisions but use different strategies for information search. Fourth, we develop a connectionist framework that explains the interaction between automatic and deliberate processes and is able to account for choices both at the option and at the strategy level.System 1, Intuition, Reasoning, Control, Routines, Connectionist Model, Parallel Constraint Satisfaction

    Metaphoric coherence: Distinguishing verbal metaphor from `anomaly\u27

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    Theories and computational models of metaphor comprehension generally circumvent the question of metaphor versus “anomaly” in favor of a treatment of metaphor versus literal language. Making the distinction between metaphoric and “anomalous” expressions is subject to wide variation in judgment, yet humans agree that some potentially metaphoric expressions are much more comprehensible than others. In the context of a program which interprets simple isolated sentences that are potential instances of cross‐modal and other verbal metaphor, I consider some possible coherence criteria which must be satisfied for an expression to be “conceivable” metaphorically. Metaphoric constraints on object nominals are represented as abstracted or extended along with the invariant structural components of the verb meaning in a metaphor. This approach distinguishes what is preserved in metaphoric extension from that which is “violated”, thus referring to both “similarity” and “dissimilarity” views of metaphor. The role and potential limits of represented abstracted properties and constraints is discussed as they relate to the recognition of incoherent semantic combinations and the rejection or adjustment of metaphoric interpretations

    Coherence Shifts in Probabilistic Inference Tasks

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    The fast-and-frugal heuristics approach to probabilistic inference assumes that individuals often employ simple heuristics to integrate cue information that commonly function in a non-reciprocal fashion. Specifically, the subjective validity of a certain cue remains stable during the application of a heuristic and is not changed by the presence or absence of another cue. The parallel-constraint-satisfaction model, in contrast, predicts that information is processed in a reciprocal fashion. Specifically, it assumes that subjective cue validities interactively af-fect each other and are modified to coherently support the favored choice. Corresponding to the model’s simulation, we predicted the direction of such coherence shifts.Cue validities were measured before, after (Exp. 1) and during judgment (Exp. 2 & 3). Coherence shifts were found in environments involving real-world cue knowledge (weather forecasts) and in a domain for which the application of fast-and-frugal heuristics has been demonstrated (city-size tasks). The results indicate that subjective cue validities are not fixed parameters, but that they are interactively changed to form coherent representations of the task.Judgment, Connectionism, Parallel Constraint Satisfaction, Fast-and-Frugal Heuristics, Adaptive Decision Making, Bounded Rationality

    Rhythmic inhibition allows neural networks to search for maximally consistent states

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    Gamma-band rhythmic inhibition is a ubiquitous phenomenon in neural circuits yet its computational role still remains elusive. We show that a model of Gamma-band rhythmic inhibition allows networks of coupled cortical circuit motifs to search for network configurations that best reconcile external inputs with an internal consistency model encoded in the network connectivity. We show that Hebbian plasticity allows the networks to learn the consistency model by example. The search dynamics driven by rhythmic inhibition enable the described networks to solve difficult constraint satisfaction problems without making assumptions about the form of stochastic fluctuations in the network. We show that the search dynamics are well approximated by a stochastic sampling process. We use the described networks to reproduce perceptual multi-stability phenomena with switching times that are a good match to experimental data and show that they provide a general neural framework which can be used to model other 'perceptual inference' phenomena

    Language choice models for microplanning and readability

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    This paper describes the construction of language choice models for the microplanning of discourse relations in a Natural Language Generation system that attempts to generate appropriate texts for users with varying levels of literacy. The models consist of constraint satisfaction problem graphs that have been derived from the results of a corpus analysis. The corpus that the models are based on was written for good readers. We adapted the models for poor readers by allowing certain constraints to be tightened, based on psycholinguistic evidence. We describe how the design of microplanner is evolving. We discuss the compromises involved in generating more readable textual output and implications of our design for NLG architectures. Finally we describe plans for future work

    Deixis, binding and presupposition

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    Dynamic semantic accounts of presupposition have proven to quite successful improvements over earlier theories. One great advance has been to link presupposition and anaphora together (van der Sandt 92, Geurts 95), an approach that extends to integrate bridging and other discourse phenomena (Asher and Lascarides 1998a,b). In this extended anaphoric account, presuppositions attach, like assertions, to the discourse context via certain rhetorical relations. These discourse attachments constrain accommodation and help avoid some infelicitous predictions of standard accounts of presupposition. Further, they have interesting and complex interactions with underspecified conditions that are an important feature of the contributions of most presupposition triggers. Deictic uses of definites, on the other hand, seem at first glance to fall outside the purview of an anaphoric theory of presupposition. There seems to be little that a discourse based theory would have to say. I will argue, however, that a discourse based account can capture how these definites function in conversation. In particular such accounts can clarify the interaction between the uses of such deictic definites and various conversational moves. At least some deictic uses of definites generate presuppositions that are bound to the context via a rhetorical function that I'll call unchoring, which if successful entails a type of knowing how. If this anchoring function is accepted, then the acceptors know how to locate the referent of the definite in the present context. I'll concentrate here just on definites that refer to spatial locations, where the intuitions about anchoring are quite clear. But I think that this view extends to other deictic uses of definites and has ramifications for an analysis of de re attitudes as well
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