This article explores the configural weighted average (CWA) hypothesis suggesting that extension biases, like conjunction and disjunction errors, occur because people estimate compound probabilities by taking a CWA of the constituent probabilities. The hypothesis suggests a process consistent with well-known cognitive constraints, which…

In visual search tasks, observers look for targets in displays containing distractors. Likelihood that targets will be missed varies with target prevalence, the frequency with which targets are presented across trials. Miss error rates are much higher at low target prevalence (1%-2%) than at high prevalence (50%). Unfortunately, low prevalence is…

Six experiments examined whether novelty versus familiarity influences global versus local processing styles. Novelty and familiarity were manipulated by either framing a task as new versus familiar or by asking participants to reflect upon novel versus familiar events prior to the task (i.e., procedural priming). In Experiments 1-3, global…