Decisional Processes with Boolean Neural Network: the Emergence of Mental Schemes

Human decisional processes result from the employment of selected quantities of relevant information, generally synthesized from environmental incoming data and stored memories. Their main goal is the production of an appropriate and adaptive response to a cognitive or behavioral task. Different strategies of response production can be adopted, among which haphazard trials, formation of mental schemes and heuristics. In this paper, we propose a model of Boolean neural network that incorporates these strategies by recurring to global optimization strategies during the learning session. The model characterizes as well the passage from an unstructured/chaotic attractor neural network typical of data-driven processes to a faster one, forward-only and representative of schema-driven processes. Moreover, a simplified version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is introduced in order to test the model. Our results match with experimental data and point out some relevant knowledge coming from psychological domain.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

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Errores en el razonamiento deductivo silogístico

En el marco de la investigación en psicología del razonamiento se distingue entre inferencias deductivas e inductivas. Entre las primeras, se ha estudiado el razonamiento silogístico, el transitivo y el razonamiento con el condicional, aunque este último también ha sido estudiado desde la perspectiva del razonamiento inductivo. En este trabajo se describe la investigación revisada sobre los errores cometidos al utilizar el razonamiento deductivo silogístico, es decir, aquel realizado con proposiciones con cuantificadores. Además, se presentan las argumentaciones que se han brindado de los diferentes modelos para explicar la aparición de los errores durante el proceso de razonar. Finalmente, se los clasifica

Risk communication and participatory research: ‘Fuzzy felt’, visual games and group discussion of complex issues

Published

Decisionmaking in practice: The dynamics of muddling through

An alternative to conventional models that treat decisions as open-loop independent choices is presented. The alterative model is based on observations of work situations such as healthcare, where decisionmaking is more typically a closed-loop, dynamic, problem-solving process. The article suggests five important distinctions between the processes assumed by conventional models and the reality of decisionmaking in practice. It is suggested that the logic of abduction in the form of an adaptive,muddling through process is more consistent with the realities of practice in domains such as healthcare.The practical implication is that the design goal should not be to improve consistency with normativemodels of rationality, but to tune the representations guiding the muddling process to increase functional perspicacity

Students mental representations in classical mechanics: three cases

We based our study on the Mental Models Theory proposed by Johnson-Laird. College students were observed during two semesters with the objective of determining the type of mental representation that they would have used during the course, when they solved the problems and conceptual questions included in the instrutional tasks. In addition an interview was carried out at the end of the course with the purpose of finding additional elements that would allow us to infer mental models on concepts used by the students in the elaboration of their answers. The results of this research suggest the importance of the mental models in the understanding of the physical concepts. It seems that the more " elaborated " the mental models are, the more easily the students understand situations and contexts different from those worked in classroom. This paper complements another one in which we presented the categories we arrived: propositionalists, propositional modelers and imagistic modelers. Each case we describe here illustrates one of these categories

Growing into deduction

Psiholozi su počeli da se eksperimentalno bave deduktivnim zaključivanjem početkom 20. veka. Ipak, zbog načina na koji su eksperimenti bili osmišljeni, nije bilo značajnih pomaka u toj oblasti sve do relativno skoro. Smatramo da postoje dva glavna razloga zbog kojih dedukcija često nije bila ispitivana na adekvatan način. Prvi je taj što su psiholozi u velikoj meri ignorisali razvoj matematičke logike i bazirali svoja istraživanja na silogizmima. Drugi razlog je uticaj gledišta, koje i dalje preovladava u semantici i logici uopšte, da su kategorički pojmovi, kao što je pojam istine, važniji od hipotetičkih pojmova, kao što je pojam dedukcije. Uticaj te dogme na psihološka istraživanja je bio dvostruk. U studijama koje su se bavile shvatanjem logičkih veznika kod odraslih i kod dece, mnogo više značaja je pridavano semantičkim aspektima veznika - istinosnim funkcijama, dok su dedukcije stavljane u drugi plan. Sa druge strane, dogma je uticala čak i na istraživanja koja su pomoću formalnih sistema ispitivala deduktivno zaključivanje na taj način što je uslovljavala izbor sistema. Istraživači su uglavnom preferirali aksiomatske formalne sisteme naspram sistema prirodne dedukcije, iako su se za izučavanje dedukcije potonji pokazali kao daleko adekvatniji.Psychologists have experimentally studied deductive reasoning since the beginning of the 20 th century. However, as we will argue, there has not been much improvement in the field until relatively recently, due to how the experiments were designed. We deem the design of the majority of conducted experiments inadequate for two reasons. The first one is that psychologists have, for the most part, ignored the development of mathematical logic and based their research on syllogistic inferences. The second reason is the influence of the view, which is dogmatically still prevalent in semantics and logic in general, that the categorical notions, such as the notion of truth, are more important than the hypothetical notions, such as the notion of deduction. The influence of this dogma has been twofold. In studies concerning logical connectives in adults and children, much more emphasis has been put on the semanti-cal aspects of the connectives-the truth functions, than on the deductive inferences. And secondly, even in the studies that investigated deductive inferences by using formal systems, the dogma still influenced the choice of the formal system. Researchers , in general, preferred the axiomatic formal systems over the systems of natural deduction, even though the systems of the second kind are much more suitable for studying deduction