Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Friday Morning Papers 15–21
ments. However, little is known about how children might use causal
contingencies to inform their judgments of causality, especially under
uncertainty. In the present study, children’s performance was remarkably
similar to the performance of adults in previous studies. However,
we found that young children (4- to 7-year-olds) are sensitive to both
conditional and unconditional causal contingencies. Although performance
within this age range is remarkably similar, we found that
4-year-olds were more sensitive to unconditional causal contingencies
and were more distracted by uncertainty than were 7-year-olds. Children’s
sensitivity to statistical properties is a robust finding across a
number of cognitive domains and might reflect an application of a
fundamental cognitive mechanism that directs cognition more generally,
rather than only causal knowledge acquisition.
9:00–9:15 (15)
The Role of Causal Knowledge in Clinical Reasoning With Mental
Disorders. WOO-KYOUNG AHN, CAROLINE PROCTOR, &
JESSECAE K. MARSH, Yale University—Clinicians believe that mental
disorders are less likely to have essences than are medical disorders
(Ahn, Flanagan, Marsh, & Sanislow, 2005) and weigh the relative importance
of symptoms more by statistical knowledge than by their
causal theories (Ahn, Levin, & Marsh, 2005). Yet Proctor and Ahn
(2005) show that causal knowledge still influences inferences of unknown
symptoms. Clinicians learned two mental disorder symptoms
(X and Y) about each person. Clinicians who learned that X causes Y
judged that a symptom associated with X, but not with Y, was more
likely to be present, whereas those who learned that Y causes X in the
same person judged that a symptom associated with Y, but not with
X, was more likely to be present. This study shows that cause features
have greater inductive potency than effect features and that how clinicians
interpret causal relations of patients’ symptoms affects their inferences
about unknown symptoms.
9:20–9:35 (16)
Statistical Contingency Has a Different Impact on Preparation
Judgments Than on Causal Judgments. JAN DE HOUWER &
STEFAAN VANDORPE, Ghent University, & TOM BECKERS, University
of Leuven—Previous studies on causal learning showed that
judgments about the causal effect of a cue on an outcome depend on
the statistical contingency between the presence of the cue and that of
the outcome. We demonstrate that statistical contingency has a different
impact on preparation judgments (i.e., judgments about the usefulness
of responses that allow one to prepare for the outcome). Our
results suggest that preparation judgments primarily reflect information
about the outcome in prior situations that are identical to the test
situation. In addition, we show that variations in the nature of the outcome
on cue-absent trials can have an impact on causal judgments.
The latter findings support the hypothesis that information about cueabsent
trials has an impact on causal judgments because this information
can reveal hidden causes that might have been responsible for
the outcome on cue-present trials.
9:40–9:55 (17)
Configural Learning in Social Reasoning and Consummatory Reasoning.
JESSE W. WHITLOW, JR., Rutgers University, Camden—
The idea that people rely on configural cues to make judgments about
causal relations was studied in a social reasoning task (deciding
whether one member of a group likes, dislikes, or has neutral feelings
for a person judged by the group) and a consummatory reasoning task
(deciding whether foods presented as part of a meal cause allergic reactions,
enhanced well-being, or no effect when the meal has been
consumed). Positive and negative patterning discriminations were
combined with positive and negative outcomes for each task. The relative
ease of positive and negative patterning discriminations depended
on both the type of outcome and the type of reasoning task.
Social reasoning tasks may use a different set of explanatory models
than do consummatory reasoning tasks.
3
Discourse Processing
Dominion Ballroom, Friday Morning, 8:00–10:00
Chaired by Gary E. Raney, University of Illinois, Chicago
8:00–8:15 (18)
Anticipation and Prior Knowledge: Are They the Key to Strategic
Reading? GARY E. RANEY, University of Illinois, Chicago, MARY
ANDERSON, College of DuPage, & TIMOTHY K. MIURA, SHARON
R. OBEIDALLAH, & FRANCES DANIEL, University of Illinois,
Chicago—Many schools promote the use of active reading strategies
(adjusting reading processes on the basis of what the reader knows and
how well the text is understood). We explored whether activating prior
knowledge, using a pretest, promotes active reading. Readers answered
six true–false questions before reading a text. Sentence reading times
were sorted into three groups on the basis of subjects’ pretest responses:
matched prior knowledge, did not match prior knowledge, or
no prior knowledge (answered “don’t know”). For expository texts,
sentences containing information that matched prior knowledge were
read more quickly than sentences that did not match prior knowledge
or provided new information. For an engaging, narrative-like passage,
results were almost opposite. Across passages, differences in reading
times between conditions varied on the basis of reading ability. Activating
prior knowledge supports the use of active reading strategies,
but strategies change on the basis of reading ability and the type of
text read. This might reflect metacognitive functioning.
8:20–8:35 (19)
Causation as the Cement of Mental Representation. JENNIFER
WILEY, University of Illinois, Chicago, & TOM TRABASSO, University
of Chicago—Previous research has demonstrated the importance
of causal structure in text processing and comprehension. The causal
status of narrative text has been shown to reliably predict coherence
judgments, reading times, importance ratings, recall protocols, and inference
verification performance. We extend these results with studies
on a diverse set of effects: goal-accessibility and reunion effects
in discourse processing, and availability and hindsight biases in decision
making. Across studies, we demonstrate parsimony and strength
of a causality-based theory of representation for explaining a wide
range of phenomena.
8:40–8:55 (20)
Character Attributes and the Representation of Fictional Information.
ANDREW M. BOLCE & RICHARD J. GERRIG, SUNY, Stony
Brook (read by Richard J. Gerrig)—In the course of experiencing fictional
worlds, readers frequently encounter information that could be
relevant to their nonfictional lives. Marsh, Meade, and Roediger (2003)
provided a series of experiments that demonstrated the extent to which
information from fictional texts becomes integrated with readers’
real-world knowledge. The goal of our project was to demonstrate
how the attributes of the characters who offered fictional facts affected
readers’ propensity to learn those facts from fiction. In Marsh
et al.’s studies, story characters offered information that was either
correct (e.g., “This here, this is a sextant and it’s the main tool used
at sea to navigate via the stars”), incorrect (e.g., “compass” replaced
“sextant”), or neutral (e.g., “This here, this is the main tool”). Our experiments
placed this type of information into the mouths of either
positive or negative characters. The characters’ attributes affected
readers’ patterns of responses on subsequent general knowledge
questions.
9:00–9:15 (21)
Limits on Updating Discourse Representations. DAVID N. RAPP
& PANAYIOTA KENDEOU, University of Minnesota—Successful
reading necessitates not only encoding information into memory, but
also updating those representations to accurately reflect what is described
in the text. The degree to which readers spontaneously update