Preference Stability and Memory: Two Unlikely Companions

Do people have stable risk preferences? This important question has engaged normativ

Explanations of comparative facts

A comparative fact can be presented in two ways. ‘Among white evangelical Christians, Obama had 40% fewer votes than McCain.’ or ‘Among white evangelical Christians, McCain had 40% more votes than Obama.’ Focusing on why Obama had fewer votes than McCain may result in a different explanation from focusing on why McCain had more votes than Obama, although it is the same fact. Thus what determines whether we focus in our explanation on Obama or McCain? In two studies, we show that people generally focused more on the first part of the comparative fact. However, when the comparative fact is presented in a negative frame (‘less … than’) there was a shift in focus from the first to the second part of the fact. For neutral items this moderating effect did not occur. The Principle of Lexical Marking (Clark, 1969) and Loss Aversion (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) are discussed as possible accounts for this shift in focus

Pattern-based Automatic Translation of Structured Power System Data to Functional Models for Decision Support Applications

Improved information and insight for decision support in operations and design are central promises of a smart grid. Well-structured information about the composition of power systems is increasingly becoming available in the domain, e.g. due to standard information models (e.g. CIM or IEC61850) or otherwise structured databases. More measurements and data do not automatically improve decisions, but there is an opportunity to capitalize on this information for decision support. With suitable reasoning strategies data can be contextualized and decision-relevant events can be promoted and identified. This paper presents an approach to link available structured power system data directly to a functional representation suitable for diagnostic reasoning. The translation method is applied to test cases also illustrating decision support

Explanations of comparative facts: A shift in focus.

A comparative fact can be presented in two ways. ‘Among white evangelical Christians, Obama had 40% fewer votes than McCain.’ or ‘Among white evangelical Christians, McCain had 40% more votes than Obama.’ Focusing on why Obama had fewer votes than McCain may result in a different explanation from focusing on why McCain had more votes than Obama, although it is the same fact. Thus what determines whether we focus in our explanation on Obama or McCain? In two studies, we show that people generally focused more on the first part of the comparative fact. However, when the comparative fact is presented in a negative frame (‘less … than’) there was a shift in focus from the first to the second part of the fact. For neutral items this moderating effect did not occur. The Principle of Lexical Marking (Clark, 1969) and Loss Aversion (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) are discussed as possible accounts for this shift in focus

Now I like it, now I don’t: Delay effects and retrospective judgment.

The present paper tests the widely accepted hypothesis that on-line judgment implies functional independence between memory for, and judgment of, verbal stimuli (e.g., Anderson, 1989; Hastie & Park, 1986). In the present study, participants recalled lists of words, after having assessed each for its pleasantness. Presentation position of a negative item within the lists was manipulated. Also, items memorability was manipulated after their presentation – by inserting a filled delay between presentation and the judgment task; in this way, on-line judgment formation was spared. The memory manipulation reduced recall rates for negative items presented in the last position – and their negative influence on pleasantness ratings accordingly. These results contradict the predictions of pure on-line approaches to judgment formation (e.g., Betsch, Plessner, Schwieren, & Gütig, 2001) and suggest that even in on-line judgment tasks, memory plays a role

Reconstructing the recent visual past: Hierarchical knowledge-based effects in visual working memory

This paper presents two experiments that examine the influence of multiple levels of knowledge on visual working memory (VWM). Experiment 1 focused on memory for faces. Faces were selected from continua that were constructed by morphing two face photographs in 100 steps; half of the continua morphed a famous face into an unfamiliar one, while the other half used two unfamiliar faces. Participants studied six sequentially presented faces each from a different continuum, and at test they had to locate one of these within its continuum. Experiment 2 examined immediate memory for object sizes. On each trial, six images were shown; these were either all vegetables or all random shapes. Immediately after each list, one item was presented again, in a new random size, and participants reproduced its studied size. Results suggested that two levels of knowledge influenced VWM. First, there was an overall central-tendency bias whereby items were remembered as being closer to the overall average or central tokens (averaged across items and trials) than they actually were. Second, when object knowledge was available for the to-be-remembered items (i.e., famous face or typical size of a vegetable) a further bias was introduced in responses