Evidence for a multidimensional account of cognitive and affective theory of mind: A state-trace analysis.

Theory of mind (ToM) has been argued to be a multidimensional construct, with ToM inferences depending on distinct processes across affective and cognitive ToM tasks and across first-order cognitive and second-order cognitive ToM tasks. Behavioural evidence for a multidimensional account has primarily depended on dissociations identified via analysis of variance, a statistical approach insufficient for assessing dimensionality. Instead, state-trace analysis (STA) is a more appropriate statistical technique to uncover dimensionality.

Unifying theories of reasoning and decision making.

De Neys offers a welcome departure from the dual-process accounts that have dominated theorizing about reasoning. However, we see little justification for retaining the distinction between intuition and deliberation. Instead, reasoning can be treated as a case of multiple-cue decision making.

Always look on the bright side of logic? Testing explanations of intuitive sensitivity to logic in perceptual tasks.

Much recent research and theorizing in the field of reasoning has been concerned with intuitive sensitivity to logical validity, such as the logic-brightness effect, in which logically valid arguments are judged to have a "brighter" typeface than invalid arguments. We propose and test a novel signal competition account of this phenomenon. Our account makes two assumptions: (a) as per the demands of the logic-brightness task, people attempt to find a perceptual signal to guide brightness judgments, but (b) when the perceptual signal is hard to discern, they instead attend to cues such as argument validity.

A test of two processes: The effect of training on deductive and inductive reasoning.

Dual-process theories posit that separate kinds of intuitive (Type 1) and reflective (Type 2) processes contribute to reasoning. Under this view, inductive judgments are more heavily influenced by Type 1 processing, and deductive judgments are more strongly influenced by Type 2 processing. Alternatively, single-process theories propose that both types of judgments are based on a common form of assessment.

In Search of the Factors Behind Naive Sentence Judgments: A State Trace Analysis of Grammaticality and Acceptability Ratings.

We present a state-trace analysis of sentence ratings elicited by asking participants to evaluate the overall acceptability of a sentence and those elicited by asking participants to focus on structural well-formedness only. Appealing to literature on "grammatical illusion" sentences, we anticipated that a simple instruction manipulation might prompt people to apply qualitatively different kinds of judgment in the two conditions. Although differences consistent with the subjective experience of grammatical illusion dissociations were observed, the state trace analysis of the rating data indicates that responses were still consistent with both judgment types accessing a single underlying factor.

Why is logic so likeable? A single-process account of argument evaluation with logic and liking judgments.

Four experiments examined the claims that people can intuitively assess the logical validity of arguments, and that qualitatively different reasoning processes drive intuitive and explicit validity assessments. In each study participants evaluated arguments varying in validity and believability using either deductive criteria (logic task) or via an intuitive, affective response (liking task). Experiment 1 found that people are sensitive to argument validity on both tasks, with valid arguments receiving higher liking as well as higher deductive ratings than invalid arguments.

The diversity effect in inductive reasoning depends on sampling assumptions.

A key phenomenon in inductive reasoning is the diversity effect, whereby a novel property is more likely to be generalized when it is shared by an evidence sample composed of diverse instances than a sample composed of similar instances. We outline a Bayesian model and an experimental study that show that the diversity effect depends on the assumption that samples of evidence were selected by a helpful agent (strong sampling). Inductive arguments with premises containing either diverse or nondiverse evidence samples were presented under different sampling conditions, where instructions and filler items indicated that the samples were selected intentionally (strong sampling) or randomly (weak sampling).

Belief bias is response bias: Evidence from a two-step signal detection model.

When asked to determine whether a syllogistic argument is deductively valid, people are influenced by their prior beliefs about the believability of the conclusion. Recently, two competing explanations for this belief bias effect have been proposed, each based on signal detection theory (SDT). Under a explanation, people set more lenient decision criteria for believable than for unbelievable arguments.

The dimensionality of reasoning: Inductive and deductive inference can be explained by a single process.

Three-experiments examined the number of qualitatively different processing dimensions needed to account for inductive and deductive reasoning. In each study, participants were presented with arguments that varied in logical validity and consistency with background knowledge (believability), and evaluated them according to deductive criteria (whether the conclusion was necessarily true given the premises) or inductive criteria (whether the conclusion was plausible given the premises). We examined factors including working memory load (Experiments 1 and 2), individual working memory capacity (Experiments 1 and 2), and decision time (Experiment 3), which according to dual-processing theories, modulate the contribution of heuristic and analytic processes to reasoning.

The effect of feedback delay on perceptual category learning and item memory: Further limits of multiple systems.

Delayed feedback during categorization training has been hypothesized to differentially affect 2 systems that underlie learning for rule-based (RB) or information-integration (II) structures. We tested an alternative possibility: that II learning requires more precise item representations than RB learning, and so is harmed more by a delay interval filled with a confusable mask. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effect of feedback delay on memory for RB and II exemplars, both without and with concurrent categorization training.

Are there two processes in reasoning? The dimensionality of inductive and deductive inferences.

Single-process accounts of reasoning propose that the same cognitive mechanisms underlie inductive and deductive inferences. In contrast, dual-process accounts propose that these inferences depend upon 2 qualitatively different mechanisms. To distinguish between these accounts, we derived a set of single-process and dual-process models based on an overarching signal detection framework.

The effect of the proportion of mismatching trials and task orientation on the confidence-accuracy relationship in unfamiliar face matching.

Unfamiliar, one-to-one face matching has been shown to be error-prone. However, it is unknown whether there is a strong relationship between confidence and accuracy in this task. If there is, then confidence could be used as an indicator of accuracy in real-world face matching settings such as border security, where the objectively correct decision is typically unknown.

Exploring the knowledge behind predictions in everyday cognition: an iterated learning study.

Making accurate predictions about events is an important but difficult task. Recent work suggests that people are adept at this task, making predictions that reflect surprisingly accurate knowledge of the distributions of real quantities. Across three experiments, we used an iterated learning procedure to explore the basis of this knowledge: to what extent is domain experience critical to accurate predictions and how accurate are people when faced with unfamiliar domains? In Experiment 1, two groups of participants, one resident in Australia, the other in China, predicted the values of quantities familiar to both (movie run-times), unfamiliar to both (the lengths of Pharaoh reigns), and familiar to one but unfamiliar to the other (cake baking durations and the lengths of Beijing bus routes).