How to use and report Bayesian hypothesis tests

This article provides guidance on interpreting and reporting Bayesian hypothesis tests, to aid their understanding. To use and report a Bayesian hypothesis test, predicted effect sizes must be specified. The article will provide guidance in specifying effect sizes of interest (which also will be of relevance to those using frequentist statistics). First, if a minimally interesting effect size can be specified, a null interval is defined as the effects smaller in magnitude than the minimally interesting effect. Then the proportion of the posterior distribution that falls in the null interval indicates the plausibility of the null interval hypothesis. Second, if a rough scale of effect can be determined, a Bayes factor can indicate evidence for a model representing that scale of effect versus a model of the null hypothesis. Both methods allow data to count against a theory that predicts a difference. By contrast, nonsignificance does not count against such a theory. Various examples are provided including the suitability of Bayesian analyses for demonstrating the absence of conscious perception under putative subliminal conditions, and its presence in supraliminal conditions

Experts and Decision Making: First Steps Towards a Unifying Theory of Decision Making in Novices, Intermediates and Experts

Expertise research shows quite ambiguous results on the abilities of experts in judgment and decision making (JDM) classic models cannot account for. This problem becomes even more accentuated if different levels of expertise are considered. We argue that parallel constraint satisfaction models (PCS) might be a useful base to understand the processes underlying expert JDM and the hitherto existing, differentiated results from expertise research. It is outlined how expertise might influence model parameters and mental representations according to PCS. It is discussed how this differential impact of expertise on model parameters relates to empirical results showing quite different courses in the development of expertise; allowing, for example, to predict under which conditions intermediates might outperform experts. Methodological requirements for testing the proposed unifying theory under complex real-world conditions are discussed.Judgment and Decision Making, Expertise, Intermediate Effects, Parallel Constraint Satisfaction, Mental Representation

Effects of Depression on Nonconscious Perception: Affective Judgment and Affective Priming

Clinical Psycholog

WHY LESS IS MORE: AN EYE TRACKING STUDY ON IDEA PRESENTATION AND ATTRIBUTE ATTENDANCE IN IDEA SELECTION

Innovation contests often result in several hundred ideas generated. Raters have to process this huge amount of ideas that consist of attributes like idea descriptions and various types of feedback infor-mation with limited cognitive resources in order to separate good from bad ideas. It is not clear to what extent raters attend the available information during idea selection. In order to improve our un-derstanding of how to best support raters in idea selection, this study investigated the influence of vari-ations of the presentation mode (two versus four ideas per screen) on the attention paid to information on idea attributes using eye-tracking. We investigated attributes that refer to idea descriptions, feed-back about the content of ideas (creativity score, tags) and about the community comprising the idea-tors and the crowd (historical success of the ideator, likes). The results of our study show that with fewer alternatives per screen, feedback attributes received more attendance, while we found no signifi-cant difference for the processing of idea descriptions. These findings provide first insights into the information-processing behaviour of raters and can inform the design of selection platforms and theory building on the effects of feedback in idea selection

Serious Games and Mixed Reality Applications for Healthcare

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have long histories in the healthcare sector, offering the opportunity to develop a wide range of tools and applications aimed at improving the quality of care and efficiency of services for professionals and patients alike. The best-known examples of VR–AR applications in the healthcare domain include surgical planning and medical training by means of simulation technologies. Techniques used in surgical simulation have also been applied to cognitive and motor rehabilitation, pain management, and patient and professional education. Serious games are ones in which the main goal is not entertainment, but a crucial purpose, ranging from the acquisition of knowledge to interactive training.These games are attracting growing attention in healthcare because of their several benefits: motivation, interactivity, adaptation to user competence level, flexibility in time, repeatability, and continuous feedback. Recently, healthcare has also become one of the biggest adopters of mixed reality (MR), which merges real and virtual content to generate novel environments, where physical and digital objects not only coexist, but are also capable of interacting with each other in real time, encompassing both VR and AR applications.This Special Issue aims to gather and publish original scientific contributions exploring opportunities and addressing challenges in both the theoretical and applied aspects of VR–AR and MR applications in healthcare

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

From Primed Concepts to Action: A Meta-Analysis of the Behavioral Effects of Incidentally Presented Words

A meta-analysis assessed the behavioral impact of and psychological processes associated with presenting words connected to an action or a goal representation. The average and distribution of 352 effect sizes (analyzed using fixed-effects and random-effects models) was obtained from 133 studies (84 reports) in which word primes were incidentally presented to participants, with a nonopposite control group, before measuring a behavioral dependent variable. Findings revealed a small behavioral priming effect (dFE = 0.332, dRE = 0.352), which was robust across methodological procedures and only minimally biased by the publication of positive (vs. negative) results. Theory testing analyses indicated that more valued behavior or goal concepts (e.g., associated with important outcomes or values) were associated with stronger priming effects than were less valued behaviors. Furthermore, there was some evidence of persistence of goal effects over time. These results support the notion that goal activation contributes over and above perception-behavior in explaining priming effects. In summary, theorizing about the role of value and satisfaction in goal activation pointed to stronger effects of a behavior or goal concept on overt action. There was no evidence that expectancy (ease of achieving the goal) moderated priming effects

Diagnosing Eyewitness Accuracy

Eyewitnesses frequently mistake innocent people for the perpetrator of an observed crime. Such misidentifications have led to the wrongful convictions of many people. Despite this, no reliable method yet exists to determine eyewitness accuracy. This thesis explored two new experimental methods for this purpose. Chapter 2 investigated whether repetition priming can measure prior exposure to a target and compared this with observers’ explicit eyewitness accuracy. Across three experiments slower responses to target faces were consistently observed irrespective of eyewitness accuracy in a lineup task. This indicates that repetition priming can provide a covert index of eyewitness accuracy. However this method could not reliably assess the accuracy of individual eyewitnesses. Chapter 3 therefore explored an alternative test of eyewitness accuracy which was based on a multiple lineup procedure for faces. The characteristics of this method were assessed over five experiments which showed that only some eyewitnesses can actually identify a perpetrator repeatedly. Chapter 4 then showed that such repeat-identifications can provide a direct index of eyewitness accuracy in a field study. Over two experiments, the success of this method was such that eyewitnesses who consistently acted on the same identity over six lineups were always accurate eyewitnesses. These results demonstrate that multiple lineups of faces could provide a useful method for assessing eyewitness accuracy. The implications of these findings, both for further study and for forensic application, are discussed