The establishment of a medical diagnosis is an incremental process highly fraught with uncertainty. At each step of this painstaking process, it may be beneficial to be able to quantify the uncertainty linked to the diagnosis and steadily update the uncertainty estimation using available sources of information, for example user feedback, as they become available. Using the example of medical da...

In this paper, the constructive nature of comparison processes (both similarity- and difference-oriented judgments) is examined through their effects on visual perception. Previous research has shown that comparison processes enhance the tendency to interpret ambiguous objects in the light of the unambiguous objects with which they are compared (Medin, Goldstone, & Gentner, 1993). In the presen...

Human emotional capabilities have recently been considered essential in decision making. An emotional model applied to the Gambling Task game is outlined here. The aim is to be able to simulate a human behavior with respect to the emotional feedback created by the environment. To do so, an OCC (Ortony, Clore and Collins) model emotion type is used to define several criteria representing a human...

Decision making in engineering is becoming increasingly complex due to the large number of alternatives and multiple conflicting goals. Powerful decisionsupport expert systems powered by suitable software are increasingly necessary. In this paper, the multiple attribute decision method known as analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which uses pairwise comparisons with numerical judgments, is cons...

Recent evidence has suggested that aggressive boys demonstrate a bias toward attributing hostility to peers in unwarranted circumstances. This study explored two aspects of cognitive processing that might be related to attributional bias: speed of decision making and selective recall of hostile cues. Groups of aggressive and nonaggressive boys at three age levels participated in a detective gam...

In a decision making task repeated encounters of a visual stimulus attribute to improved performance in identification and classification of that stimulus. This process is termed as repetition priming. Recent studies have proposed that response learning (RL), where previous decision gets associated with that item, accounts for a significant portion of performance gains observed in repetition pr...

The quality and safety of health care are under increasing scrutiny. Recent studies suggest that medical errors, practice variability, and guideline noncompliance are common, and that cognitive error contributes significantly to delayed or incorrect diagnoses. These observations have increased interest in understanding decision-making psychology.Many nonrational (i.e., not purely based in stati...

Information technology has the potential to promote joint creation of new ideas. It has become widely recognized that the workings of human cognitive processes heavily rely on physical externalization of the interaction of those processes with outside environments, including other people in those environments. Such ex-ternalization takes various forms, from conversation, written texts, sketches...

We study how the mechanisms of choice influence preferences when animals face more than 2 alternatives simultaneously. Choice mechanisms can be hierarchical (if alternatives are assigned to categories by their similarity and choice is between categories) or simultaneous (if options enter the choice process individually, each with its own value). The latter, although simpler, can lead to counter...

Contingency management is an effective treatment for drug addiction. The current explanation for its success is rooted in alternative reinforcement theory. We suggest that alternative reinforcement theory is inadequate to explain the success of contingency management and produce a model based on demand curves that show how little the monetary rewards offered in this treatment would affect drug ...