Information selection and belief updating in hypothesis evaluation

This thesis is concerned with the factors underlying both selection and use of evidence in the testing of hypotheses. The work it describes examines the role played in hypothesis evaluation by background knowledge about the probability of events in the environment as well as the influence of more general constraints. Experiments on information choice showed that subjects were sensitive both to explicitly presented probabilistic information and to the likelihood of evidence with regard to background beliefs. It is argued - in contrast with other views in the literature - that subjects' choice of evidence to test hypotheses is rational allowing for certain constraints on subjects' cognitive representations. The majority of experiments in this thesis, however, are focused on the issue of how the information which subjects receive when testing hypotheses affects their beliefs. A major finding is that receipt of early information creates expectations which influence the response to later information. This typically produces a recency effect in which presenting strong evidence after weak evidence affects beliefs more than if the same evidence is presented in the opposite order. These findings run contrary to the view of the belief revision process which is prevalent in the literature in which it is generally assumed that the effects of successive pieces of information are independent. The experiments reported here also provide evidence that processes of selective attention influence evidence interpretation: subjects tend to focus on the most informative part of the evidence and may switch focus from one part of the evidence to another as the task progresses. in some cases, such changes of attention can eliminate the recency effect. In summary, the present research provides new evidence about the role of background beliefs, expectations and cognitive constraints in the selection and use of information to test hypotheses. Several new findings emerge which require revision to current accounts of information integration in the belief revision literature.Faculty of Human Sciences at the University of Plymout

Poor mental health is associated with the exacerbation of personal debt problems : A study of debt advice adherence

Peer reviewedPostprin

Do Children Who Experience Regret Make Better Decisions? A Developmental Study of the Behavioral Consequences of Regret

Although regret is assumed to facilitate good decision making, there is little research directly addressing this assumption. Four experiments (N = 326) examined the relation between children's ability to experience regret and the quality of their subsequent decision making. In Experiment 1 regret and adaptive decision making showed the same developmental profile, with both first appearing at about 7 years. In Experiments 2a and 2b, children aged 6–7 who experienced regret decided adaptively more often than children who did not experience regret, and this held even when controlling for age and verbal ability. Experiment 3 ruled out a memory-based interpretation of these findings. These findings suggest that the experience of regret facilitates children's ability to learn rapidly from bad outcomes

The development of regret

In two experiments, 4- to 9-year-olds played a game in which they selected one of two boxes to win a prize. On regret trials the unchosen box contained a better prize than the prize children actually won, and on baseline trials the other box contained a prize of the same value. Children rated their feelings about their prize before and after seeing what they could have won if they had chosen the other box and were asked to provide an explanation if their feelings had changed. Patterns of responding suggested that regret was experienced by 6 or 7 years of age; children of this age could also explain why they felt worse in regret trials by referring to the counterfactual situation in which the prize was better. No evidence of regret was found in 4- and 5-year-olds. Additional findings suggested that by 6 or 7 years, children’s emotions were determined by a consideration of two different counterfactual scenarios

Waring's Problem in Finite Rings

In this paper we obtain sharp results for Waring's problem over general finite rings, by using a combination of Artin-Wedderburn theory and Hensel's lemma and building on new proofs of analogous results over finite fields that are achieved using spectral graph theory. We also prove an analogue of S\'ark\"ozy's theorem for finite fields.Comment: 34 page