The Development of Reasoning about Causal and Noncausal Influences on Levers

2 studies examined 5–12-year-olds' judgments regarding the behavior of balance scales and other levers whose arms varied in a causal (the number of equally weighted objects or their distances from the fulcrum) or a noncausal (the color, position, or orientation of objects) variable. There were age-related increases in correct judgments for each causal and noncausal variable, with children tending to make correct judgments about the influence of physical features of objects (their number and color) at an earlier age than they did about spatial relations between objects (their distance, orientation, and position). Children's patterns of errors judging the influence of causal (particularly distance) and noncausal (particularly position and orientation) variables were different, and there was no relation between children's correct judgments regarding causal and noncausal variables The results suggest that there are separate processes underlying children's ability to identify causal and dismiss noncausal influences on levers which are dependent on the kinds of features (physical or both physical and spatial) which children conceive of as potentially influencing the behavior of levers.     

The role of elevation in moral judgment

ABSTRACT

Elevation is the emotion elicited by witnessing acts of moral beauty and may be framed as the opposite of disgust. Two studies investigated the role of elevation in moral judgment and its relation to disgust. In Study 1 it was investigated whether elevation can attenuate the effects of disgust on moral transgression judgments. Participants were either induced to experience disgust (by giving them a bitter beverage), or to experience disgust and elevation simultaneously (by video induction). No effects of either emotion on moral transgression judgments were found. In Study 2 the nature of causal connectedness between elevation and moral virtue judgments was investigated by testing whether elevation amplifies moral virtue judgments. It was found that participants judged morally good acts as being more morally good when being elevated, suggesting that there is a bidirectional causal link between elevation and judgments of moral virtue.     

Assessment as Judgment-in-Context: Analysing how teachers evaluate students' writing 1

In this paper, we analyse teachers' judgments of students' written texts. We document how teachers use evidence in ways that depend both on their knowledge of the students and on the assessment framework they need to use. We analyse teachers' judgments by contrasting the structures of assessments made using teachers' normal classroom judgment processes with those made using an external set of “benchmark” standards. We show how the tension between demands for system-wide assessment validity and localised contextually sensitive site validity impacts on the richness and consistency of the judgment processes. We conclude that current understandings of teacher judgment processes that operate in everyday assessment practices generally fail to account for the complexity and dynamism of this routine classroom activity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the methodology of judgment analysis, combined with think-aloud protocols, has the potential to shed light on the complexities associated with the operation of judgment in educational assessment.     

Anchoring,Attributions, and Self-Efficacy: An Examination of Interactions

This study addresses gaps in the current literature by examining hypotheses based on the integration of self-efficacy, anchoring, and attribution theory. A novel anchor, attributional feedback, was utilized after an initial performance episode, and its influence on self-efficacy judgments was examined. This study also tested the previously ignored mediating influence of attributional analysis on the relationship between performance and self-efficacy as well as the influence of different attributions on self-efficacy under conditions of both successful and unsuccessful performance. Findings of this research indicate that carefully structured feedback is crucial when discussing an individual's performance, as this feedback may influence the causal attributions that are made; moreover, it is through this attributional analysis that past performance affects judgments of self-efficacy.     

Methodological concerns: the feeling-of-knowing task affects resolution

In traditional feeling-of-knowing procedures, participants make judgments on unrecalled items only (e.g. Hart 1965). However, many researchers elicit feeling-of-knowing judgments (FOKs) on all items. When FOKs are made on all items, participants may use recall as a basis for judgments, leading to higher magnitude judgments for recalled items, but causing a relative floor effect for judgments for unrecalled items. We suspected that resolution (relative accuracy) would be better when FOKs are made on all items than when they are made on unrecalled items only. We examined the issue by comparing across studies, reanalyzing data from another experiment, and by conducting an original experiment. In the literature review, we included 83 conditions across 52 studies. We found that feeling-of-knowing judgments made on all items showed higher resolution than feeling-of-knowing judgments made on unrecalled items. This was replicated in the reanalysis of existing data of a single study that used both methods. In the original experiment, we collected feeling-of-knowing judgments for general-information questions. The experiment confirmed that resolution for predicting recognition was higher when feeling-of-knowing judgments were made on all items than when they were made only on unrecalled items. We discuss both methodological and theoretical implications of these data.     

Development of the Physical Educators’ Judgments about Inclusion Instrument for Japanese Physical Education Majors and an Analysis of their Judgments

The purpose of this study was to assess the validity and reliability of the Physical Educators’ Judgments about Inclusion (PEJI) survey for analysing the judgments of Japanese (361 male, 170 female) physical education teacher education majors. A secondary purpose was to examine group differences in judgments as a function of gender and past experiences. Data were collected and psychometrical properties of the PEJI were assessed using a maximum-likelihood extraction method. Confirmatory factor analysis resulted in salient loadings for all items on three hypothesised dimensions, resulting in 47% explained variance for measuring judgments about: Inclusion versus Exclusion, Acceptance of Students with Disabilities, and Perceived Training Needs. Supported by the three interpretable factors that emerged, construct validity evidence is presented. Although most of the physical education teacher education majors sampled had yet to teach students with disabilities, they had formed preliminary judgments about doing so.     

Causal Explanations for Weight Influence Children’s Social Preferences: Biological-Essentialist Explanations Reduce,and Behavioral Explanations Promote,Preferences for Thin Friends

The current study experimentally investigated the impact of causal-explanatory information on weight bias over development. Participants (n = 395, children ages 4–11 years and adults) received either a biological or behavioral explanation for body size, or neither, in three between-subjects conditions. Participants then made preference judgments for characters with smaller versus larger body sizes. Results showed that both behavioral and biological explanations impacted children’s preferences. Relative to children’s baseline preferences, behavioral explanations enhanced preferences for smaller characters, and biological explanations reduced these preferences—unlike the typical facilitative impact of biological-essentialist explanations on other biases. The explanations did not affect adults’ preferences. In contrast to previous findings, we demonstrate that causal knowledge can impact weight bias early in development.     

Anchoring effects on prospective and retrospective metacomprehension judgments as a function of peer performance information

Two experiments were conducted to investigate anchoring effects on metacomprehension judgments as a function of fictitious information participants received about past peer performance. In Experiment 1 participants were randomly assigned to one of the three anchor groups that, in some cases, provided past peer performance averages in terms of a percentage: a high anchor (85%) a low anchor (55%), and no anchor. Results showed that relative to the no anchor group, the low anchor group made significantly lower prospective judgments whereas the high anchor group did not make significantly higher prospective judgments. With a high anchor of greater magnitude (95%), Experiment 2 demonstrated more pronounced anchoring effects on prospective judgments: Relative to the no anchor group, the low anchor group made significantly lower judgments and the high anchor group made significantly higher judgments. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that anchoring effects occurred even on retrospective judgments. Overall, the results showed that peer performance information can serve as an anchoring point for metacomprehension judgments and the anchoring effects are tenacious given that they can even affect retrospective judgments of performance.     

A common error term regulates acquisition but not extinction of causal judgments in people

In three experiments, we used the allergist task to examine the role of error correction mechanisms in the acquisition and extinction of causal judgments in people. Consistent with existing human and animal studies, acquisition of causal judgments was influenced by the discrepancy between the allergenic outcome and that predicted by all of the cues present on a trial (the "common error" term). However, in the present experiments, we failed to detect any evidence for the use of a common error term in extinction learning: Judgments of the allergenic properties of a cue were unaffected by the predictive value of the other cues present on a trial. This asymmetry in the use of a common error term in acquisition and extinction learning is inconsistent with previous animal studies and also with most models of associative learning. However, approaches that allow learning to be specific to a particular arrangement of elemental cues (context specific and state based) offer some explanation of the observed asymmetry.     

Developing causal understanding with causal maps: the impact of total links, temporal flow, and lateral position of outcome nodes

This study examined some of the methodological approaches used by students to construct causal maps in order to determine which approaches help students understand the underlying causes and causal mechanisms in a complex system. This study tested the relationship between causal understanding (ratio of root causes correctly/incorrectly identified, number of correctly identified root-cause links explaining how root causes directly/indirectly impact final outcomes) and three attributes observed in students’ causal maps (total links, temporal flow, lateral position of final outcome) that students produced before and after online discussions on noted similarities and differences between students’ causal maps. The findings suggest that: (a) causal understanding can be adversely affected if students are instructed before group discussion to temporally sequence nodes to flow from left to right and to position the outcome node farther away from the left edge of the map relative to other nodes in the map; (b) causal understanding following group discussion can be increased by instructing students to minimize the number of causal links and create a map with temporally flow; (c) promoting temporal flow following discussion may be the most effective means of helping students to identify root causes; and (d) instructing students to minimize the number of links following discussion may be the most effective means to helping students explain root causes directly/indirectly impact outcomes. These findings provide insights on what processes and constraints can be formalized and integrated into causal mapping software when used as an instructional and assessment tool.     

Attentional changes in blocking are not a consequence of lateral inhibition

In three human causal learning experiments, we examined attentional modulation in the blocking task, in which participants typically learn little about a novel cue B when it is paired with a previously trained, predictive cue A. Evidence indicates that this blocking training led to a decrement in attention to the blocked cue B. The present experiments addressed whether this decrease in attention to the blocked cue could be better explained as being due to lateral inhibition from the pretrained cue A to the blocked cue B, or as a cue-specific property that is not conditional on the presence or absence of other stimuli. Strong effects of learned predictiveness were observed on participants’ causal judgments (Experiment 1) and choice behavior (Experiments 2 and 3). However, no evidence for lateral inhibitory processes emerged in any of the experiments, despite explicit attempts to maximize experimental sensitivity to this effect. The results are discussed in the context of formal models of the operation of attentional processes in human and animal learning.     

Children's judgements of psychological harm in normal and noncanonical situations

This study investigated children's (3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds) and adults' (total N = 92) integration of information about intentions, acts, and outcomes in moral judgments of psychological harm. Behavioral and emotional predictions and judgments of act acceptability and punishment were made under normal and noncanonical causal conditions. Participants at all ages judged it wrong to inflict negative psychological reactions of fear or embarrassment on unwilling participants, even when these reactions were idiosyncratic or noncanonical. When assigning punishment, younger children tended to use an outcome rule, whereas older participants were more likely to use an intention rule or a conjunction rule (if outcome is negative and intention is negative, then punish). The results show that children as young as 3 years are able to take into account other people's idiosyncratic perspectives when making moral judgments of psychological harm.     

Imagery as a private audiovisual aid

Mental images are conscious representations of our knowledge of the world. Like audiovisual aids in instructional programs, they can be intentionally and systematically used as the informational base for cognitive operations and as an aid to new learning. They permit one to make judgments, computations, and inferences that depend upon world knowledge. They can be consciously manipulated for problem solving and creative purposes. They can be used as learning and memory aids in numerous tasks, including foreign language learning where they function as a kind of private voix et image program that provides referential contexts for the language in the absence of the referent objects and situations themselves. Experimental evidence is cited to support these claims.     

Human causality judgments and response rates on DRL and DRH schedules of reinforcement

The effect of various relationships between a response (an investment made in the context of a game) and an outcome (a return on the investment) on judgments of the causal effectiveness of the response was examined. In Experiment 1, response rates and causal judgments were higher for a differential-reinforcement-of-high-rate (DRH) schedule relative to a variable-ratio (VR) schedule with the same probability of outcome following a response. Response rates were also higher for a DRH than for a variable-interval schedule matched for reinforcement rate. In Experiment 2, response rates and causal judgments were lower for a differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate schedule relative to a VR schedule with the same probability of outcome following a response. These results corroborate the view that schedules are a determinant of both response rates and causal judgments, and that few current theories of causal judgment explicitly predict this pattern of results.     

Simultaneous decisions at study: time allocation, ordering, and spacing

Learners of all ages face complex decisions about how to study effectively. Here we investigated three such decisions made in concert—time allocation, ordering, and spacing. First, college students were presented with, and made judgments of learning about, 16 word-synonym pairs. Then, when presented with all 16 pairs, they created their own study schedule by choosing when and how long to study each item. The results indicated that (a) the most study time was allocated to difficult items, (b) relatively easy items tended to be studied first, and (c) participants spaced their study at a rate significantly greater than chance. The spacing data, which are of particular interest, differ from previous findings that have suggested that people, including adults, believe massing is more effective than spacing.     

The Emergence of Forgiveness in Young Children

Humans depend greatly on our cooperative relationships. Thus, when our relationships are damaged by transgressions, they need to be repaired. Such repair requires that the transgressor show remorse and the victim forgive. Previous research demonstrates that as transgressors, young children show remorse and attempt to repair the harm they caused. However, it remains unclear when children, as victims, forgive remorseful transgressors. In Study 1, 5-, but not 4-year-olds, (n = 20 each) were more forgiving of a remorseful transgressor (who did not explicitly apologize) than an unremorseful transgressor. In Study 2, 4-year-olds (n = 20) were more forgiving of an apologetic than unapologetic transgressor. Thus, from early in ontogeny, humans are motivated to repair damaged relationships and thus uphold cooperation.     

Adding Design Elements to Improve Time Series Designs: No Child Left Behind as an Example of Causal Pattern-Matching

Abstract:

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous preintervention functional forms are common, as are other factors affecting posttest means and slopes. Using No Child Left Behind as an example, we demonstrate how adding multiple design elements to the basic ITS structure serves to promote causal inference by limiting alternative interpretations. No added design element is perfect by itself, but we argue that they collectively provide a strong causal warrant when the predictions they engender are complex, the results “cohere” with the predictions, and no alternative can fit the same pattern of predictions even if it can fit some of them.     

he Effects of Transgressors’ Affective Reactions on Children's Moral Judgments

Abstract

The present study investigated the degree to which transgressors’ affective reactions influence children's moral judgments. Eighteen children at each of three different grade levels (first‐, second‐, and third‐grade) were required to make judgments of the goodness or badness of four different transgressors.The transgressors acted out of good or bad intent, produced low or high levels of damage and displayed the affective reactions of happiness, sadness or neutrality because of the outcomes they produced.

Results showed that the transgressors’ affective reactions significantly influenced the children's moral judgments. More importantly, the children excluded intention information when they evaluated transgressors who displayed reactions of happiness. But, they did not exclude intentions when they evaluated transgressors who displayed reactions of sadness or neutrality. A number of hypotheses were offered to account for the means by which reactions of happiness block children's use of intent information.     

A plausible connection: Models examining the relations between evaluation,plausibility, and the refutation text effect

Students are often asked to make evaluations of scientific explanations, which may involve judgments about the plausibility of competing alternatives. We examined undergraduate students' critical evaluations and plausibility perceptions of climate change when reading two different types of text: expository and refutation. Our findings show that greater critical evaluation and higher plausibility related to more knowledge after reading, but only with the refutation text. Furthermore, we found that greater plausibility had a stronger effect on knowledge after reading the refutation text, whereas greater background knowledge had a stronger effect on knowledge after reading the expository text. We also examined changes in students' plausibility and knowledge. There was significant changes in plausibility and knowledge with the refutation text, but no significant change in either variable with the expository text. These results suggest that evaluations and judgments about plausibility may be factors contributing to the refutation effect and knowledge reconstruction.     

Preschool-Aged Children Jointly Consider Others’ Emotional Expressions and Prior Knowledge to Decide When to Explore

Emotional expressions are abundant in children’s lives. What role do they play in children’s causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool-aged children use others’ emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0–4.9; N = 112, the United States) learned about one salient causal function of a novel toy and then saw an adult play with it. Children explored the toy more when the adult expressed surprise than when she expressed happiness (Experiment 1), but only when the adult already knew about the toy’s salient function (Experiment 2). These results suggest that children consider others’ knowledge and selectively interpret others’ surprise as vicarious prediction error to guide their own exploration.