Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： There are lots of evidences showing that participant’s performance on Bayesian inference, syllogistic reasoning and probability reasoning could be promoted by cumulative frequency tree. However, very few study focuses on the promotion effect of frequency tree on causal reasoning. This study carried out two experiments to investigate the effect of frequency tree on causal strength inference. The research hypotheses include: (a) Frequency tree featuring a explicit nest-sets structure (ENS) can improve the rationality of participant’s reasoning, while the frequency tree featuring a concealed nest-sets structure (CNS) can’t improve rationality of reasoning; (b) Participants estimate the causal strength of different contingencies by different modes in experimental treatment which used frequency tree featuring a CNS; and (c) There are more participants estimate the causal strength by Power–PC model in preventive contingency rather than in productive contingency. 2 (Frequency tree, level 1: featuring a ENS, level 2: featuring a CNS) × 2 (causal direction, level 1: productive, level 2: preventive) × 3 (contingency, level 1: DP = 0.33 and Power – PC = 0.5; level 2: DP = 0.33 and Power – PC = 0.83; level 3: DP = 0.67 and Power – PC = 0.83) completely random design were used in two experiments. 469 undergraduate students participated in Experiment 1 which adopted counter–factual question, and 463 undergraduate students participated in Experiment 2 which adopted ability question. Contingency was offered by a booklet which contains 30 pages, and each page presents one sample related to the causality. Participant completed a frequency tree based on contingency, and estimated the causal strength of contingency individual. The frequency tree featuring a ENS consists of three types of information: the number of total samples, the number of samples in focus set, and the number of samples that represent effect emerge or not, while frequency tree featuring a CNS consists of the number of total samples and samples that represent effect emerge or not. The study found that (a) There are three common models of causal reasoning: Dp, Power–PC and P (E/C) for productive contingency (or P(-E/C) for preventive contingency), the most popular model changes with different experiment treatments; (b) 70.06 % of participants estimate causal strength by Power–PC model when they used frequency tree featuring a ENS, and only a few participants (about 21.28 %) estimate causal strength by Power–PC model when they used frequency tree featuring a CNS; (c) The type of frequency tree and the format of question have combining influence on causal strength evaluation, and the type of frequency tree have more influences on strength evaluation than the format of question; (d) Both contingency effect and causal direction effect are present from the experimental treatment which used frequency tree featuring a CNS. Experiment results significantly support research hypotheses (a), (b) and (c). These results indicate that frequency facilitating effect depends on supply nest-sets structure or not, whether in counter–factual question treatment or in ability question treatment. According to above two experiments, it is suggested that participant tends to make rational inference when they use frequency tree featuring a ENS or they were questioned by counter–factual format.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： The knowledge of statistical information, experimental results and informant’s testimonies can provide important help for children to understand science world. In the past decade, the psychological mechanism of the interaction of the three kinds of information in children's scientific thinking has not been elucidated. In this study, research paradigm from Bridgers et al. (2016) had been used to explore the interaction of independent exploration and informant testimony on physical causal reasoning of 5-year-old children. Moreover, children's perception of testimony's reliability and informant's self-awareness had been analyzed simultaneously. The proposed approach is supported by two experiments which can be summarized as follows. Experiment 1 adopted a 2×2 completely randomized design. The independent variable is the confidence of testimony (two levels: self-confidence, not-confidence) and the number of children’s independent exploration (two levels: no-exploration, nine-exploration). The dependent variable is the frequency of children's choice of candidate cause. Informant's testimony (such as A is more likely to cause an effect than B) was given by an adult female in a laptop, and children played with a music box to get evidences contradicting testimony (B is more likely to cause an effect than A). In this paper, 84 preschool children (50 boys and 34 girls, mean age 63.7 months) took part in experiment 1. The results show that there are more children choose cause contradicting testimony in nine-exploration level than in no-exploration level, but the difference between treatments was not statistically significant. Moreover, children are not sensitive to the testimony's reliability and informant's self-awareness. Experiment 1 found that the evidences support cause B did not significantly improved child's choice of cause B, in condition that testimony support cause A. The possible reason is the amount of evidence that support cause B is too small. To test this hypothesis, Experiment 2 used a big amount of evidence that support cause B to explore the interaction of independent exploration and informant’s testimony. A single factor completely random experimental design was adopted in experiment 2, and the independent variable is the confidence of testimony (two levels: self-confidence, not-confidence). Experimental procedure is the same as the nine-exploration level in experiment 1. There were 54 preschool children (28 boys and 26 girls, mean age 63.9 months) took part in experiment 2, and each child independently played with a music box eighteen times. The results show that children are more likely to choose cause contradicting testimony in the eighteen-exploration level than in no-exploration level (experiment 1). Once again, children are not sensitive to testimony's reliability and informant's self-awareness. The results of two experiments indicate that 5-year-old children can integrate the evidence from independent exploration and the testimony from informant to infer causality relationship. The number of children who choose cause contradicting testimony is increased by the increase in the number of evidence contradicting testimony. The follow-up research should focus on the interaction effect between the exploration of preschool child, the results of adult’s experiment and the testimony from informants, and focus on how to motivate children to evaluate adult’s self-awareness and credibility.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Previous studies have showed that information held in working memory (WM) can guide or capture attention during visual search in a relatively automatic way, even when it is irrelevant and detrimental to current task performance. Some researchers have proposed that the semantic match between WM contents and distractors could also capture attention, as well as the perceptual match. As we known, the verbal WM contents can be stored in the visual and auditory inputs. Even though the automatic influence of visual verbal WM on visual attention have been demonstrated, it remains unknown whether the auditory verbal WM could automatically capture attention. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the attention guidance by the verbal WM contents. The present study included two experiments to explore the questions presented above. In Experiment 1, the memory item was a verbal Chinese character that presented visually, denoting a color, such as “红”. The participants were instructed to remember the word and avoid the potential distractors. Subsequently, they completed a visual search task, in order to test whether the verbal WM contents could guide attention. The results showed that, compared with the control condition, the visual search RTs were longer in the perceptual-matching and semantic-matching conditions, and the same as the RTs in the fastest trials. With the memory item that never matched the target in the search task, we suggested that the verbal WM contents that were presented visually (vis-VWM) could capture attention at perceptual and semantic levels automatically. In Experiment 2, the memory item was presented by the auditory inputs via the headphones (audi-VWM). The results showed that the visual search RTs in the semantic-matching condition were shorter than RTs in the control and perceptual-matching conditions, and there was no significant difference in the other conditions. Meanwhile, compared the shortest RTs across the different conditions, the results showed that the RTs in the semantic-matching condition were longer than in the control condition, which suggested that the aurally presented verbal WM could capture attention at the semantic level in the fastest response trials. In conclusion, the present study demonstrated that the verbal working memory that presented visually could automatically capture attention at both perceptual and semantic levels, and also verified the hypothesis that the attention capture effect would occur at the early stages of attention. However, the contents of verbal working memory would always capture attention at the earlier processing stage and could only be rejected at the later processing stage when the contents were aurally presented. Due to the modality specificity, attentional resources would be distributed to different sensory modalities. The memory-matching distractors could be rejected at the later processing stage because of there were the sufficient cognitive resources.
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