On the interchangeability of presentation order for cause and effect: Experimental tests of cue and outcome-density effects.

Studies of cue-outcome contingency learning demonstrate outcome-density effects: participants typically overestimate contingencies when the outcome event is relatively frequent. Equivalent cue-density effects occur, although these have been examined less often. Few studies have simultaneously examined both event density effects or have manipulated the presentation order of the events, limiting knowledge of whether these phenomena share underlying principles.

How and Why the Choice of Success Criteria Can Impact Therapy Service Delivery: A Worked Example From a Psychological Therapy Service for Anxiety and Depression.

Background: Well-defined measures of therapeutic benefit are essential for evaluating therapies and services. However, there is no single gold standard for defining 'successful' outcomes. We therefore examined the potential impact of adopting different success criteria.

Testing the somatic marker hypothesis in decisions-from-experience with non-stationary outcome probabilities.

Introduction: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH) posits that in experience-based choice, people develop physiological reactions that mark options as either positive or negative. These somatic markers aid decision making because they differentiate between "good" and "bad" options during pre-choice deliberation.

Methods: We examined this proposed role for somatic states in two decision-from-experience tasks (each = 36) in which participants selected repeatedly with full feedback (i.

Examining Insensitivity to Probability in Evidence-Based Communication of Relative Risks: The Role of Affect and Communication Format.

Affect can influence judgments of event riskiness and use of risk-related information. Two studies (Ns: 85 and 100) examined the insensitivity-to-probability effect-where people discount probability information when scenarios are affect-rich-applying it to evidence-informed risk communication. We additionally investigated whether this effect is moderated by format, based on predictions from the evaluability and pattern-recognition literatures, suggesting that graphical formats may attenuate insensitivity to probability.

Clinical Judgement Analysis: An innovative approach to explore the individual decision-making processes of pharmacists.

Background: Pharmacy stands increasingly on the frontline of patient care, yet current studies of clinical decision-making by pharmacists only capture deliberative processes that can be stated explicitly. Decision-making incorporates both deliberative and intuitive processes. Clinical Judgement Analysis (CJA) is a method novel to pharmacy that uncovers intuitive decision-making and may provide a more comprehensive understanding of the decision-making processes of pharmacists.

Understanding the relationship between safety beliefs and knowledge for cognitive enhancers in UK university students.

Background: Cognitive enhancers (CE) are prescription drugs taken, either without a prescription or at a dose exceeding that which is prescribed, to improve cognitive functions such as concentration, vigilance or memory. Previous research suggests that users believe the drugs to be safer than non-users and that they have sufficient knowledge to judge safety. However, to date no research has compared the information sources used and safety knowledge of users and non-users.

Outdoor recreational activity experiences improve psychological wellbeing of military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder: Positive findings from a pilot study and a randomised controlled trial.

The authors confirm that all ongoing and related trials for this intervention are registered. The studies reported in this manuscript are registered as clinical trials at ISRCTN: Pilot ID- ISRCTN15325073 RCT ID- ISRCTN59395217.

Losing my loss aversion: The effects of current and past environment on the relative sensitivity to losses and gains.

It is often assumed that most people are loss averse, placing more weight on losses than commensurate gains; however, some research identifies variability in loss sensitivity that reflects features of the environment. We examined this plasticity in loss sensitivity by manipulating the size and distribution of possible outcomes in a set of mixed gambles, and assessing individual stability in loss sensitivity. In each of two sessions, participants made accept-reject decisions for 64 mixed-outcome gambles.

Further investigations of how rare disaster information affects risk taking: A registered replication report.

Across two experiments, Newell, Rakow, Yechiam, and Sambur (Nature Climate Change, 6(2), 158-161, 2016) demonstrated that providing rare disaster information increased people's tolerance for risk-taking. These results motivated a series of as yet-unpublished follow-up experiments involving new manipulations. However, the failure to replicate the original finding in these follow-ups has led our confidence in the original effect to wane.

Understanding the Effect of Information Presentation Order and Orientation on Information Search and Treatment Evaluation.

Background: Past research finds that treatment evaluations are more negative when risks are presented after benefits. This study investigates this order effect: manipulating tabular orientation and order of risk-benefit information, and examining information search order and gaze duration via eye-tracking.

Design: 108 (Study 1) and 44 (Study 2) participants viewed information about treatment risks and benefits, in either a horizontal (left-right) or vertical (above-below) orientation, with the benefits or risks presented first (left side or at top).

Understanding Children's Heart Surgery Data: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Codevelop a Website.

Risk-adjusted survival statistics after children's heart surgery are published annually in the United Kingdom. Interpreting these statistics is difficult, and better resources about how to interpret survival data are needed. Here we describe how a multidisciplinary team of mathematicians, psychologists, and a charity worked with parents of heart surgery children and other users to codevelop online resources to present survival outcomes.

Go for broke: The role of somatic states when asked to lose in the Iowa Gambling Task.

The Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH) posits that somatic states develop and guide advantageous decision making by "marking" disadvantageous options (i.e., arousal increases when poor options are considered).

Forgone but not forgotten: the effects of partial and full feedback in "harsh" and "kind" environments.

In a perfect world, the choice of any course of action would lead to a satisfactory outcome, and we would obtain feedback about both our chosen course and those we have chosen to forgo. In reality, however, we often face harsh environments in which we can only minimize losses, and we receive impoverished feedback. In these studies, we examined how decision makers dealt with these challenges in a simple task in which we manipulated three features of the decision: The outcomes from the available options were either mostly positive or mostly negative (kind or harsh environment); feedback was either full or partial (outcomes revealed for all options or only for the chosen option); and for the final 20 trials in a sequence, participants either chose on each trial or set an "advance-directive" policy.

Understanding Clinicians' Use of Cues When Assessing the Future Risk of Violence: A Clinical Judgement Analysis in the Psychiatric Setting.

Unlabelled: Research is sparse on how clinicians' judgement informs their violence risk assessments. Yet, determining preferences for which risk factors are used, and how they are weighted and combined, is important to understanding such assessments. This study investigated clinicians' use of static and dynamic cues when assessing risk in individual patients and for dynamic cues considered in the recent and distant past.

The pros and cons of funnel plots as an aid to risk communication and patient decision making.

Funnel plots, which simultaneously display a sample statistic and the corresponding sample size for multiple cases, have a range of applications. In medicine, they are used to display treatment outcome rates and caseload volume by institution, which can inform strategic decisions about health care delivery. We investigated lay people's understanding of such plots and explored their suitability as an aid to individual treatment decisions.

Forgetting the past: individual differences in recency in subjective valuations from experience.

Recent research investigating decisions from experience suggests that not all information is treated equally in the decision process, with more recently encountered information having a greater impact. We report 2 studies investigating how this differential treatment of sequentially encountered information affects subjective valuations of risky prospects when observations of past outcomes must be used to estimate the prospect's payoff distribution, and examine how individual differences in cognitive capacities influence information usage. In Study 1 we found that a sliding window of information model that averages a subset of (only) the most recently encountered outcomes (samples) fit the subjective valuation data for a portion of individuals better than models that integrate all observed outcomes.

Self-insight research as (double) model recovery.

Self-insight assessment compares outcomes from two model-recovery exercises: a statistical exercise to infer a judge's (implicit) policy and an elicitation exercise whereby the judge describes his or her (explicit) policy. When these policies are mismatched, limited self-insight is not necessarily implied: Shortcomings in either exercise could be implicated, whereby Newell & Shanks' (N&S's) relevance or sensitivity criteria for assessing awareness may not be met. Appropriate self-insight assessment requires that both exercises allow the original processes to be captured.

If quantum probability = classical probability + bounded cognition; is this good, bad, or unnecessary?

Quantum probability models may supersede existing probabilistic models because they account for behaviour inconsistent with classical probability theory that are attributable to normal limitations of cognition. This intriguing position, however, may overstate weaknesses in classical probability theory by underestimating the role of current knowledge states and may under-employ available knowledge about the limitations of cognitive processes. In addition, flexibility in model specification has risks for the use of quantum probability.

Probability matching in risky choice: the interplay of feedback and strategy availability.

Probability matching in sequential decision making is a striking violation of rational choice that has been observed in hundreds of experiments. Recent studies have demonstrated that matching persists even in described tasks in which all the information required for identifying a superior alternative strategy-maximizing-is present before the first choice is made. These studies have also indicated that maximizing increases when (1) the asymmetry in the availability of matching and maximizing strategies is reduced and (2) normatively irrelevant outcome feedback is provided.

Who can recognize unfamiliar faces? Individual differences and observer consistency in person identification.

It can be remarkably difficult to determine whether two photographs of unfamiliar faces depict the same person or two different people. This fallibility is well established in the face perception and eyewitness domain, but most of this research has focused on the "average" observer by measuring mean performance across groups of participants. This study deviated from this convention to provide a detailed description of individual differences and observer consistency in unfamiliar face identification by assessing performance repeatedly, across a 3-day (Experiment 1) and a 5-day period (Experiment 2).

Simple and multistate survival curves: can people learn to use them?

Unlabelled: OBJECTIVE AND SAMPLE: This investigation assessed the comprehension of survival curves in a community sample of 88 young and middle-aged adults when several aspects of good practice for graphical communication were implemented, and it compared comprehension for alternative presentation formats. DESIGN, METHOD, and

Measurements: After reading worked examples of using survival curves that provided explanation and answers, participants answered questions on survival data for pairs of treatments. Study 1 compared presenting survival curves for both treatments on the same figure against presentation via 2 separate figures.

The effect of foregone outcomes on choices from experience.

We examined the relative weight given to obtained and foregone outcomes (i.e., outcomes from the non-chosen options) in repeated choices using cognitive modeling.

A qualitative investigation of selecting surrogate decision-makers.

Background: Empirical studies of surrogate decision-making tend to assume that surrogates should make only a 'substituted judgement'--that is, judge what the patient would want if they were mentally competent.

Objectives: To explore what people want in a surrogate decision-maker whom they themselves select and to test the assumption that people want their chosen surrogate to make only a substituted judgement.

Methods: 30 undergraduate students were recruited.

Assessing risk and prioritizing referral for self-harm: when and why is my judgement different from yours?

Unlabelled: This study investigated individual differences in the use of risk factors when making risk assessments for self-harm. Clinical judgement analysis using 35 hypothetical case scenarios was used to determine how case characteristics influence risk assessment for self-harm by mental health professionals. Seven practitioners made four risk/priority assessment judgements for each case, and individual models of judgement for risk and priority were constructed by regressing 10 case variables onto these sets of judgements.