The repulsion effect in preferential choice and its relation to perceptual choice

People rely on the choice context to guide their decisions, violating fundamental principles of rational choice theory and exhibiting phenomena called context effects. Recent research has uncovered that dominance relationships can both increase or decrease the choice share of the dominating option, marking the two ends of an attraction–repulsion continuum. However, empirical links between the two opposing effects are scarce and theoretical accounts are missing altogether. The present study (N = 55) used eye tracking alongside a within-subject design that contrasts a perceptual task and a preferential-choice analog in order to bridge this gap and uncover the underlying information-search processes. Although individuals differed in their perceptual and preferential choices, they generally engaged in alternative-wise comparisons and a repulsion effect was present in both conditions that became weaker the more predominant the attribute-wise comparisons were. Altogether, our study corroborates the notion that repulsion effects are a robust and general phenomenon that theoretical accounts need to take seriously

Absolute and relative stability of loss aversion across contexts

Individuals’ decisions under risk tend to be in line with the notion that “losses loom larger than gains”. This loss aversion in decision making is commonly understood as a stable in- dividual preference that is manifested across different contexts. The presumed stability and generality, which underlies the prominence of loss aversion in the literature at large, has been recently questioned by studies reporting how loss aversion can disappear, and even reverse, as a function of the choice context. The present study investigated whether loss aversion reflects a trait-like attitude of avoiding losses or rather individuals’ adaptability to different contexts. We report three experiments investigating the within-subject context sensitivity of loss aversion in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Our results show that the choice context can shift people’s loss aversion, though somewhat inconsistently. Moreover, individual estimates of loss aversion are shown to have a considerable degree of stability. Altogether, these results indicate that even though the absolute value of loss aversion can be affected by external factors such as the choice context, estimates of people’s loss aversion still capture the relative dispositions towards gains and losses across individuals

Un Prototipo Di Pianoforte Digitale Con Feedback Vibrotattile

Questo lavoro presenta i risultati di due esperimenti percettivi compiuti su un prototipo di pianoforte digitale aumentato. L'obiettivo di entrambi gli esperimenti era studiare la percezione da parte del pianista di feedback vibrotattile sulla tastiera. Nel primo esperimento i soggetti coinvolti dovevano suonare liberamente al variare del feedback, e fornire un giudizio sulla qualit\ue0 percepita dello strumento in una griglia di cinque attributi: controllo dinamico, ricchezza, coinvolgimento, naturalezza, e preferenza complessiva. Nel secondo esperimento si \ue8 misurata l'accuratezza (in termini di tempo e di controllo dinamico) nell'esecuzione di una scala, al variare del feedback. I risultati mostrano una preferenza per le condizioni in cui \ue8 presente feedback vibrotattile, tuttavia per quanto riguarda l'accuratezza dell'esecuzione non sono state osservate differenze significative tra le diverse condizioni

Assessing framing of uncertainties in water management practice

Dealing with uncertainties in water management is an important issue and is one which will only increase in light of global changes, particularly climate change. So far, uncertainties in water management have mostly been assessed from a scientific point of view, and in quantitative terms. In this paper, we focus on the perspectives from water management practice, adopting a qualitative approach. We consider it important to know how uncertainties are framed in water management practice in order to develop practice relevant strategies for dealing with uncertainties. Framing refers to how people make sense of the world. With the aim of identifying what are important parameters for the framing of uncertainties in water management practice, in this paper we analyze uncertainty situations described by decision-makers in water management. The analysis builds on a series of ¿Uncertainty Dialogues¿ carried out within the NeWater project with water managers in the Rhine, Elbe and Guadiana basins in 2006. During these dialogues, representatives of these river basins were asked what uncertainties they encountered in their professional work life and how they confronted them. Analysing these dialogues we identified several important parameters of how uncertainties get framed. Our assumption is that making framing of uncertainty explicit for water managers will allow for better dealing with the respective uncertainty situations. Keywords Framing - Uncertainty - Water management practic

Feedback control of arm movements using Neuro-Muscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES) combined with a lockable, passive exoskeleton for gravity compensation.

Within the European project MUNDUS, an assistive framework was developed for the support of arm and hand functions during daily life activities in severely impaired people. This contribution aims at designing a feedback control system for Neuro-Muscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES) to enable reaching functions in people with no residual voluntary control of the arm and shoulder due to high level spinal cord injury. NMES is applied to the deltoids and the biceps muscles and integrated with a three degrees of freedom (DoFs) passive exoskeleton, which partially compensates gravitational forces and allows to lock each DOE The user is able to choose the target hand position and to trigger actions using an eyetracker system. The target position is selected by using the eyetracker and determined by a marker-based tracking system using Microsoft Kinect. A central controller, i.e., a finite state machine, issues a sequence of basic movement commands to the real-time arm controller. The NMES control algorithm sequentially controls each joint angle while locking the other DoFs. Daily activities, such as drinking, brushing hair, pushing an alarm button, etc., can be supported by the system. The robust and easily tunable control approach was evaluated with five healthy subjects during a drinking task. Subjects were asked to remain passive and to allow NMES to induce the movements. In all of them, the controller was able to perform the task, and a mean hand positioning error of less than five centimeters was achieved. The average total time duration for moving the hand from a rest position to a drinking cup, for moving the cup to the mouth and back, and for finally returning the arm to the rest position was 71 s

When fast logic meets slow belief: Evidence for a parallel-processing model of belief bias.

Two experiments pitted the default-interventionist account of belief bias against a parallel-processing model. According to the former, belief bias occurs because a fast, belief-based evaluation of the conclusion pre-empts a working-memory demanding logical analysis. In contrast, according to the latter both belief-based and logic-based responding occur in parallel. Participants were given deductive reasoning problems of variable complexity and instructed to decide whether the conclusion was valid on half the trials or to decide whether the conclusion was believable on the other half. When belief and logic conflict, the default-interventionist view predicts that it should take less time to respond on the basis of belief than logic, and that the believability of a conclusion should interfere with judgments of validity, but not the reverse. The parallel-processing view predicts that beliefs should interfere with logic judgments only if the processing required to evaluate the logical structure exceeds that required to evaluate the knowledge necessary to make a belief-based judgment, and vice versa otherwise. Consistent with this latter view, for the simplest reasoning problems (modus ponens), judgments of belief resulted in lower accuracy than judgments of validity, and believability interfered more with judgments of validity than the converse. For problems of moderate complexity (modus tollens and single-model syllogisms), the interference was symmetrical, in that validity interfered with belief judgments to the same degree that believability interfered with validity judgments. For the most complex (three-term multiple-model syllogisms), conclusion believability interfered more with judgments of validity than vice versa, in spite of the significant interference from conclusion validity on judgments of belief