How do people build up visual memory representations from sensory evidence? Revisiting two classic models of choice.

In many decision tasks, we have a set of alternative choices and are faced with the problem of how to use our latent beliefs and preferences about each alternative to make a single choice. Cognitive and decision models typically presume that beliefs and preferences are distilled to a scalar latent strength for each alternative, but it is also critical to model how people use these latent strengths to choose a single alternative. Most models follow one of two traditions to establish this link.

Local but not global graph theoretic measures of semantic networks generalize across tasks.

"Dogs" are connected to "cats" in our minds, and "backyard" to "outdoors." Does the structure of this semantic knowledge differ across people? Network-based approaches are a popular representational scheme for thinking about how relations between different concepts are organized. Recent research uses graph theoretic analyses to examine individual differences in semantic networks for simple concepts and how they relate to other higher-level cognitive processes, such as creativity.