Constructing Preferences in the Physical World: A Distributed-Cognition Perspective on Preferences and Risky Choices

Psychological research has firmly established that risk preferences are transient states shaped by past experiences, current knowledge, and feelings as well as the characteristics of the decision environment. We begin this article with a brief review of evidence supporting this conception as well as different psychological theories explaining how preferences are constructed. Next, we introduce the distributed perspective on human cognition and show how it may offer a promising framework for unifying seemingly incompatible accounts. We conclude by suggesting new directions for better capturing the essence of preference construction in laboratory research

Do Do Do, The The The: Interactivity and Articulatory Suppression in Mental Arithmetic

Doing long sums in the absence of complementary actions or artefacts is a multi-step procedure that quickly taxes working memory; congesting the phonological loop further handicaps performance. In the experiment reported here, participants completed long sums either with hands down—the low interactivity condition—or by moving numbered tokens—the high interactivity condition—while they repeated ‘the’ continuously, loading the phonological loop, or not. As expected, articulatory suppression substantially affected performance, but more so in the low interactivity condition. Independent measures of basic arithmetic skill and mathematics anxiety moderated the impact of articulatory suppression on performance in the low but not in the high interactivity condition. These findings suggest that working memory resources are augmented with interactivity, underscoring the importance of characterizing the properties of the system as it is configured by the dynamic agent-environment coupling

Kinenoetic analysis : unveiling the material traces of insight

Research on insight problem solving sets itself a challenging goal: How to explain the origin of a new idea. It compounds the difficulty of this challenge by traditionally seeking to explain the phenomenon in strictly mental terms. Rather, we suggest that thoughts and actions are bound to objects, inviting a granular description of the world within which thinking proceeds. As the reasoner transforms the world, the physical traces of these changes can be mapped in space and time. Not only can the reasoner see these changes, and act upon them, the researcher can develop new inscription devices that captures the trajectory of the creative arc along spatial and temporal coordinates. Kinenoetic is a term we employ to capture the idea that knowledge comes from the movement of objects and that this knowledge is both at the level of the problem-solver and at the level of the researcher. This form of knowledge can only be constructed in problem solving environments where reasoners can manipulate physical elements. A kinenoetic analysis tracks and maps the changes to the object-qua-models of proto solutions, and in the process unveils the physical genesis of new ideas and creativity. Our aim here is to lay out a method for using the objects commonly employed in interactive problem-solving research, tracing the process of thought to elucidate underlying cognitive mechanisms. Thus, the focus turns from the effects of objects on thoughts, to tracing object-thought mutualities as they are enacted and made visible

Insight with stumpers: normative solution data for 25 stumpers and a fresh perspective on the accuracy effect

When people solve a problem, they can do in one of two ways - analytically or through insight. There is robust evidence showing that a problem solved insightfully is more likely to be correct than one solved through analysis, the so-called accuracy or correctness effect in insight research. However, the nature of the insight problems in the laboratory means that it is often not easy to disentangle whether a participant feels correct or whether she actually is correct. We report data from two studies using stumpers as stimuli. Stumpers are a form of riddle in which it is possible to generate a plausible but incorrect answer. Alongside normative data for 25 stumpers, we also demonstrate that insight is linked to certainty in the answer rather than whether the answer is correct or not and that certainty (subjective correctness) is a stronger predictor of the feeling of insight than objective correctness. The findings support work into false insight and further add to the understanding of the phenomenology of ‘aha’ moments

Insight with hands and things

Two experiments examined whether different task ecologies influenced insight problem solving. The 17 animals problem was employed, a pure insight problem. Its initial formulation encourages the application of a direct arithmetic solution, but its solution requires the spatial arrangement of sets involving some degree of overlap. Participants were randomly allocated to either a tablet condition where they could use a stylus and an electronic tablet to sketch a solution or a model building condition where participants were given material with which to build enclosures and figurines. In both experiments, participants were much more likely to develop a working solution in the model building condition. The difference in performance elicited by different task ecologies was unrelated to individual differences in working memory, actively open-minded thinking, or need for cognition (Experiment 1), although individual differences in creativity were correlated with problem solving success in Experiment 2. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for the prevailing metatheoretical commitment to methodological individualism that places the individual as the ontological locus of cognition