Integrating evidence from multiple sources to guide decisions is something humans do on a daily basis. Existing research suggests that not all sources of information are weighted equally in decision-making tasks, and that observers are subject to biases in the face of internal and external noise. Here we describe two experiments that measured…

Young children show remarkably sophisticated abilities to evaluate others. Yet their abilities to engage in proportional moral evaluation undergoes protracted development. Namely, young children evaluate someone who shares "absolutely" more as being "nicer" than someone who shares "proportionally" more (e.g., sharing…

How do we assess what we remember? Previous work on metacognition suggests that confidence judgments are more accurate when given after than before a response to a perceptual task. Here we present two experiments that investigate the influence of decision and response on metacognitive accuracy in a memory task so as to establish what kind of…

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 265) responded to eight scenarios presented on an eye tracker. Each trial involved a character who encounters a perpetrator who had previously enacted positive (P), negative (N), or both types of actions toward him or her in varying sequences (NN, PP, PN, and NP). Participants predicted the character's…

Usage patterns for common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition in free naming (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). The current research evaluates whether this continued evolution is shown in receptive judgments as well, given their differing cognitive demands. We found an extended learning…

Functional Measurement (FM) has been applied to a variety of settings that can be considered as "extreme" settings; that is, settings involving participants with severe cognitive disabilities or involving unusual stimulus material. FM has, as instance, been successfully applied for analyzing (a) numerosity judgments among children as…

Describes four experiments conducted among adults and 3- to 7-year-olds to validate a task analysis that indicates that the equality, group enhancement, and superiority social decisions require a greater information processing load than the altruism, rivalry, and individualism social decisions. (HOD)

Whether judgments made by complete strangers as to the intelligence of subjects are accurate or merely illusory was studied in Germany. Target subjects were 50 female and 50 male adults recruited through a newspaper article. Eighteen judges, who did not know the subjects, were recruited from a university community. Videorecordings of the subjects,…

A model of how the human cognitive system operates in its natural social context is presented. The model focuses on both input and output variables that have been ignored in the development of most other cognitive theories. Unique predictions of the model and empirical evidence bearing on them are discussed. (Author/LMO)

Human behavior is governed by assumptions and beliefs ("theory-in-use"), yet individuals commonly explain their behavior in terms of a (different) "espoused" theory. Suggests reflective practice in counseling can only be achieved by counselors identifying their own theories-in-use through critical thinking. This task also…

Examined developmental differences in evidence evaluation skills among school children, non-college educated adults, and college students, utilizing plant growth variables. Found that children were more strongly influenced by prior beliefs and missing data than were the two adult groups. Age and educational differences were found in the…