A general model of fluency effects in judgment and decision making

Processing or cognitive fluency is the experienced ease of ongoing mental processes. This experience infl uences a wide range of judgments and decisions. We present a general model for these fluency effects. Based on Brunswik’s lens-model, we conceptualize fluency as a meta-cognitive cue. For the cue to impact judgments, we propose three process steps: people must experience fluency; the experience must be attributed to a judgment-relevant source; and it must be interpreted within the judgment context. This interpretation is either based on available theories about the experience’s meaning or on the learned validity of the cue in the given context. With these steps the model explains most fl uency effects and allows for new and testable predictions

Research and Applications of the Processes of Performance Appraisal: A Bibliography of Recent Literature, 1981-1989

[Excerpt] There have been several recent reviews of different subtopics within the general performance appraisal literature. The reader of these reviews will find, however, that the accompanying citations may be of limited utility for one or more reasons. For example, the reference sections of these reviews are usually composed of citations which support a specific theory or practical approach to the evaluation of human performance. Consequently, the citation lists for these reviews are, as they must be, highly selective and do not include works that may have only a peripheral relationship to a given reviewer\u27s target concerns. Another problem is that the citations are out of date. That is, review articles frequently contain many citations that are fifteen or more years old. The generation of new studies and knowledge in this field occurs very rapidly. This creates a need for additional reference information solely devoted to identifying the wealth of new research, ideas, and writing that is changing the field

Representation Effects and Loss Aversion in Analytical Behaviour: An Experimental Study into Decision Making Facilitated by Visual Analytics

This paper presents the results of an experiment into the relationship between the representation of data and decision-making. Three hundred participants online, were asked to choose between a series of financial investment opportunities using data presented in line charts. A single dependent variable of investment choice was examined over four levels of varying display conditions and randomised data. Three variations to line chart visualisations provided a controlled factor between subjects divided into three groups; -˜standard’ line charts, -˜tall’ line charts, and one dual-series line chart. The final results revealed a consistent main effect and two other interactions between certain display conditions and decision-making. The findings of this paper are significant to the study visualisation and to the field of visual analytics. This experiment was devised as part of a study into Analytical Behaviour, defined as decision-making facilitated by visual analytics - a new topic that encompasses existing research and real-world applications

Relevance and Conditionals: A Synopsis of Open Pragmatic and Semantic Issues

Recently several papers have reported relevance effects on the cognitive assessments of indicative conditionals, which pose an explanatory challenge to the Suppositional Theory of conditionals advanced by David Over, which is influential in the psychology of reasoning. Some of these results concern the “Equation” (P(if A, then C) = P(C|A)), others the de Finetti truth table, and yet others the uncertain and-to-inference task. The purpose of this chapter is to take a Birdseye view on the debate and investigate some of the open theoretical issues posed by the empirical results. Central among these is whether to count these effects as belonging to pragmatics or semantics

The Current State of Performance Appraisal Research and Practice: Concerns, Directions, and Implications

On the surface, it is not readily apparent how some performance appraisal research issues inform performance appraisal practice. Because performance appraisal is an applied topic, it is useful to periodically consider the current state of performance research and its relation to performance appraisal practice. This review examines the performance appraisal literature published in both academic and practitioner outlets between 1985 and 1990, briefly discusses the current state of performance appraisal practice, highlights the juxtaposition of research and practice, and suggests directions for further research

A canonical theory of dynamic decision-making

Decision-making behavior is studied in many very different fields, from medicine and eco- nomics to psychology and neuroscience, with major contributions from mathematics and statistics, computer science, AI, and other technical disciplines. However the conceptual- ization of what decision-making is and methods for studying it vary greatly and this has resulted in fragmentation of the field. A theory that can accommodate various perspectives may facilitate interdisciplinary working. We present such a theory in which decision-making is articulated as a set of canonical functions that are sufficiently general to accommodate diverse viewpoints, yet sufficiently precise that they can be instantiated in different ways for specific theoretical or practical purposes. The canons cover the whole decision cycle, from the framing of a decision based on the goals, beliefs, and background knowledge of the decision-maker to the formulation of decision options, establishing preferences over them, and making commitments. Commitments can lead to the initiation of new decisions and any step in the cycle can incorporate reasoning about previous decisions and the rationales for them, and lead to revising or abandoning existing commitments. The theory situates decision-making with respect to other high-level cognitive capabilities like problem solving, planning, and collaborative decision-making. The canonical approach is assessed in three domains: cognitive and neuropsychology, artificial intelligence, and decision engineering

A review of research into the development of radiologic expertise: Implications for computer-based training

Rationale and Objectives. Studies of radiologic error reveal high levels of variation between radiologists. Although it is known that experts outperform novices, we have only limited knowledge about radiologic expertise and how it is acquired.Materials and Methods. This review identifies three areas of research: studies of the impact of experience and related factors on the accuracy of decision-making; studies of the organization of expert knowledge; and studies of radiologists' perceptual processes.Results and Conclusion. Interpreting evidence from these three paradigms in the light of recent research into perceptual learning and studies of the visual pathway has a number of conclusions for the training of radiologists, particularly for the design of computer-based learning programs that are able to illustrate the similarities and differences between diagnoses, to give access to large numbers of cases and to help identify weaknesses in the way trainees build up a global representation from fixated regions

Looking for a psychology for the inner rational agent

Research in psychology and behavioural economics shows that individuals’ choices often depend on ‘irrelevant’ contextual factors. This presents problems for normative economics, which has traditionally used preference-satisfaction as its criterion. A common response is to claim that individuals have context-independent latent preferences which are ‘distorted’ by psychological factors, and that latent preferences should be respected. This response implicitly uses a model of human action in which each human being has an ‘inner rational agent’. I argue that this model is psychologically ungrounded. Although references to latent preferences appear in psychologically-based explanations of context-dependent choice, latent preferences serve no explanatory purpose