Stimulating Influenza Vaccination via Prosocial Motives.

Objective: Americans do not vaccinate nearly enough against Influenza (flu) infection, despite severe health and economic burden of influenza. Younger people are disproportionately responsible for transmission, but do not suffer severely from the flu. Thus, to achieve herd immunity, prosocial motivation needs to be a partial driver of vaccination decisions.

Causal essentialism in kinds.

The current study examines causal essentialism, derived from psychological essentialism of concepts. We examine whether people believe that members of a category share some underlying essence that is both necessary and sufficient for category membership and that also causes surface features. The main claim is that causal essentialism is restricted to categories that correspond to our intuitive notions of existing kinds and hence is more attenuated for categories that are based on arbitrary criteria.

Causal imprinting in causal structure learning.

Suppose one observes a correlation between two events, B and C, and infers that B causes C. Later one discovers that event A explains away the correlation between B and C. Normatively, one should now dismiss or weaken the belief that B causes C.

The effect of explanation in simple binary decision tasks.

Many studies of explanation have focused on higher level tasks and on how explanations draw upon relevant prior knowledge, which then helps in understanding some event or observation. However, explanations may also affect performance in simple tasks even when they include no task-relevant information. In three experiments, we show that explanations adding no task-relevant information alter performance in a sequential binary decision task.

Contributions of familiarity and recollection rejection to recognition: evidence from the time course of false recognition for semantic and conjunction lures.

It has been suggested that both familiarity and recollection contribute to the recognition decision process. In this paper we leverage the form of false alarm rate functions--in which false alarm rates describe an inverted U-shaped function as the time between study and test increases--to assess how these processes support retention of semantic and surface form information from previously studied words. We directly compare the maxima of these functions for lures that are semantically related and lures that are related by surface form to previously studied material.

There are at least two kinds of probability matching: evidence from a secondary task.

Probability matching is a suboptimal behavior that often plagues human decision-making in simple repeated choice tasks. Despite decades of research, recent studies cannot find agreement on what choice strategies lead to probability matching. We propose a solution, showing that two distinct local choice strategies-which make different demands on executive resources-both result in probability-matching behavior on a global level.

Classifying partial exemplars: seeing less and learning more.

Categories underlie a variety of functions beyond just classification, including inference and explanation. To classify, people need to distinguish between categories, but other functions rely on within-category information (things true of a particular category, independent of others). Despite the need for both types of knowledge, recent work shows that classification does not lead to learning an important type of within-category information, prototypical nondiagnostic information.

Student training in large-animal handling at the School of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences, Murdoch University, Australia.

The ability to handle animals safely, competently, and with confidence is an essential skill for veterinarians. Poor animal-handling skills are likely to compromise credibility, occupational health and safety, and animal welfare. In the five-year veterinary science degree at Murdoch University, animal handling is taught in a prerequisite unit in the second semester of the second year.