Implicit and Explicit Processes in Multiple Cue Judgement

Making judgements often involves integrating multiple pieces of information, or cues, in the environment. While experts, such as physicians, are able to make accurate judgements from multiple cues, they often have poor insight into how they make their inferences. This provides some indication that judgement is influenced by knowledge that is implicit and inaccessible to verbal report. In the present thesis, the cognitive processes involved in multiple cue judgement were explored by training participants on a small number of novel cues using the multiple cue probability learning (MCPL) paradigm. In a training phase, participants predicted a criterion and received outcome feedback in response to each judgement. Learning and judgement in these tasks is often assumed to draw on explicit hypothesis-testing processes. However, a great deal of research suggests that implicit as well as explicit processes can contribute to performance on complex tasks. In eight experiments, several methods were used to examine the role of explicit and implicit processes in multiple cue judgement. While concurrent working memory loads failed to disrupt judgements after learning, we nevertheless found clear evidence that explicit processing is involved in the learning of negative, but not positive cues. Performance on such tasks was correlated with individual differences in working memory capacity, as well as measures of explicit knowledge obtained in the learning process. The results are discussed with respect to dual process theories of learning, judgement, and reasoning. The findings of the present thesis indicate that multiple cue judgement is best viewed within a dual process framework

Who tugs at our heart strings? The effect of avatar images on player generosity in the dictator game.

The present research was motivated by a prior study, where several wallets, each containing a photo of either a baby, a puppy, a family, or an elderly couple, were scattered across a city in the United Kingdom (Wiseman, 2009). Most of the wallets containing a photo of a baby were returned compared to less than a third of wallets containing a photo of an elderly couple. To investigate further, in a series of three studies we examined, using a pseudo online version of the dictator game, possible subtle cues supporting prosocial behaviour by manipulating the type of avatar used by the recipient of the donation made by the 'dictator'. Overall, it emerged that participants showed significantly higher levels of generosity towards babies, and older people, supporting the notion that perceptions of vulnerability and need drive prosocial behaviour