Not All People Are Cut Out for Strategic Criterion Shifting

Decisions are often based on memory, but memories are often vague and ambiguous. Therefore, one must establish some standard for how strong a memory must feel before it is accepted as part of one’s past. This standard of evidence, called a decision criterion, should be adapted to the demands of a given situation: Sometimes it is critical to accept only strong memories as legitimate, whereas at other times it is more appropriate to act on the basis of relatively weak memory evidence. The ability to shift between these two standards as circumstances warrant is a critical element of successful decision making. We review recent work examining criterion shifting in recognition memory and argue that the true nature of criterion shifting may be seen only at the individual level: Whereas some people shift their criterion quite adaptively, others do not shift at all

Dubious decision evidence and criterion flexibility in recognition memory.

When old-new recognition judgments must be based on ambiguous memory evidence, a proper criterion for responding "old" can substantially improve accuracy, but participants are typically suboptimal in their placement of decision criteria. Various accounts of suboptimal criterion placement have been proposed. The most parsimonious, however, is that subjects simply over-rely on memory evidence - however faulty - as a basis for decisions. We tested this account with a novel recognition paradigm in which old-new discrimination was minimal and critical errors were avoided by adopting highly liberal or conservative biases. In Experiment 1, criterion shifts were necessary to adapt to changing target probabilities or, in a "security patrol" scenario, to avoid either letting dangerous people go free (misses) or harming innocent people (false alarms). Experiment 2 added a condition in which financial incentives drove criterion shifts. Critical errors were frequent, similar across sources of motivation, and only moderately reduced by feedback. In Experiment 3, critical errors were only modestly reduced in a version of the security patrol with no study phase. These findings indicate that participants use even transparently non-probative information as an alternative to heavy reliance on a decision rule, a strategy that precludes optimal criterion placement

How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias

Why do some faces appear more similar than others? Beyond structural factors, we speculate that similarity is governed by the organization of faces located in a multi-dimensional face space. To test this hypothesis, we morphed a typical face with an atypical face. If similarity judgments are guided purely by their physical properties, the morph should be perceived to be equally similar to its typical parent as its atypical parent. However, contrary to the structural prediction, our results showed that the morph face was perceived to be more similar to the atypical face than the typical face. Our empirical studies show that the atypicality bias is not limited to faces, but extends to other object categories (birds) whose members share common shape properties. We also demonstrate atypicality bias is malleable and can change subject to category learning and experience. Collectively, the empirical evidence indicates that perceptions of face and object similarity are affected by the distribution of stimuli in a face or object space. In this framework, atypical stimuli are located in a sparser region of the space where there is less competition for recognition and therefore, these representations capture a broader range of inputs. In contrast, typical stimuli are located in a denser region of category space where there is increased competition for recognition and hence, these representation draw a more restricted range of face inputs. These results suggest that the perceived likeness of an object is influenced by the organization of surrounding exemplars in the category space

The Confidence Database

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analysed using multiple software packages. Each dataset is accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (which is available at https://osf.io/s46pr/) contained 145 datasets with data from more than 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. Here we show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimations of several foundational confidence-related effects

Not All People Are Cut Out for Strategic Criterion Shifting

Decisions are often based on memory, but memories are often vague and ambiguous. Therefore, one must establish some standard for how strong a memory must feel before it is accepted as part of one’s past. This standard of evidence, called a decision criterion, should be adapted to the demands of a given situation: Sometimes it is critical to accept only strong memories as legitimate, whereas at other times it is more appropriate to act on the basis of relatively weak memory evidence. The ability to shift between these two standards as circumstances warrant is a critical element of successful decision making. We review recent work examining criterion shifting in recognition memory and argue that the true nature of criterion shifting may be seen only at the individual level: Whereas some people shift their criterion quite adaptively, others do not shift at all

The importance of decision bias for predicting eyewitness lineup choices: toward a Lineup Skills Test

Abstract ᅟ We report on research on individual-difference measures that could be used to assess the validity of eyewitness identification decisions. Background The predictive utility of face recognition tasks for eyewitness identification has received some attention from psychologists, but the previous research focused primarily on witnesses’ likelihood of correctly choosing the culprit when present in a lineup. Far less discussed has been individual differences in witnesses’ proclivity to choose from a lineup that does not contain the culprit. We designed a two-alternative non-forced-choice face recognition task (consisting of mini-lineup test pairs, half old/new and half new/new) to predict witnesses’ proclivity to choose for a set of culprit-absent lineups associated with earlier-viewed crime videos. Results In two studies involving a total of 402 participants, proclivity to choose on new/new pairs predicted mistaken identifications on culprit-absent lineups, with r values averaging .43. The likelihood of choosing correctly on old/new pairs (a measure of face recognition skill) was only weakly predictive of correct identifications in culprit-present lineups (mean r of .22). Conclusions Our findings could be the basis for further research aimed at developing a standardized measure of proclivity to choose that could be used, along with other measures, to weigh eyewitnesses’ lineup identification decisions

Dubious decision evidence and criterion flexibility in recognition memory.

When old-new recognition judgments must be based on ambiguous memory evidence, a proper criterion for responding "old" can substantially improve accuracy, but participants are typically suboptimal in their placement of decision criteria. Various accounts of suboptimal criterion placement have been proposed. The most parsimonious, however, is that subjects simply over-rely on memory evidence - however faulty - as a basis for decisions. We tested this account with a novel recognition paradigm in which old-new discrimination was minimal and critical errors were avoided by adopting highly liberal or conservative biases. In Experiment 1, criterion shifts were necessary to adapt to changing target probabilities or, in a "security patrol" scenario, to avoid either letting dangerous people go free (misses) or harming innocent people (false alarms). Experiment 2 added a condition in which financial incentives drove criterion shifts. Critical errors were frequent, similar across sources of motivation, and only moderately reduced by feedback. In Experiment 3, critical errors were only modestly reduced in a version of the security patrol with no study phase. These findings indicate that participants use even transparently non-probative information as an alternative to heavy reliance on a decision rule, a strategy that precludes optimal criterion placement