When remembering a real-world scene, people encode both detailed information about specific objects and higher order information like the overall gist of the scene. However, formal models of change detection, like those used to estimate visual working memory capacity, assume observers encode only a simple memory representation that includes no…

Experimental evidence suggests that the content of a memory for even a simple display encoded in visual short-term memory (VSTM) can be very complex. VSTM uses organizational processes that make the representation of an item dependent on the feature values of all displayed items as well as on these items' representations. Here, we develop a…

The scale-invariant memory, perception, and learning (SIMPLE) model developed by Brown, Neath, and Chater (2007) formalizes the theoretical idea that scale invariance is an important organizing principle across numerous cognitive domains and has made an influential contribution to the literature dealing with modeling human memory. In the context…

Transitivity of preferences is a fundamental principle shared by most major contemporary rational, prescriptive, and descriptive models of decision making. To have transitive preferences, a person, group, or society that prefers choice option "x" to "y" and "y" to "z" must prefer "x" to…

Tsetsos, Usher, and Chater (2010) presented several criticisms of decision field theory (DFT) involving its distance function, instability under externally controlled stopping times, and lack of robustness to various multialternative choice scenarios. Here, we counter those claims with a specification of a distance function based on the…

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 119(2) of Psychological Review (see record 2012-06153-001). In the article, incorrect versions of figures 3 and 6 were included. Also, Table 8 should have included the following information in the table footnote "P(A V) = probability of acquittal given unanimous verdict." All…

On the basis of the statistical concept of waiting time and on computer simulations of the "probabilities of nonoccurrence" (p. 457) for random sequences, Hahn and Warren (2009) proposed that given people's experience of a finite data stream from the environment, the gambler's fallacy is not as gross an error as it might seem. We deal with two…

This article contrasts 2 approaches to analyzing transitivity of preference and other behavioral properties in choice data. The approach of Regenwetter, Dana, and Davis-Stober (2011) assumes that on each choice, a decision maker samples randomly from a mixture of preference orders to determine whether "A" is preferred to "B." In contrast, Birnbaum…

The very early appearance of abstract knowledge is often taken as evidence for innateness. We explore the relative learning speeds of abstract and specific knowledge within a Bayesian framework and the role for innate structure. We focus on knowledge about causality, seen as a domain-general intuitive theory, and ask whether this knowledge can be…

A central puzzle for theories of choice is that people's preferences between options can be reversed by the presence of decoy options (that are not chosen) or by the presence of other irrelevant options added to the choice set. Three types of reversal effect reported in the decision-making literature, the attraction, compromise, and similarity…

This article develops a parsimonious descriptive model of individual choice and valuation in the kinds of experiments that constitute a substantial part of the literature relating to decision making under risk and uncertainty. It suggests that many of the best known "regularities" observed in those experiments may arise from a tendency for…

A quantum probability model is introduced and used to explain human probability judgment errors including the conjunction and disjunction fallacies, averaging effects, unpacking effects, and order effects on inference. On the one hand, quantum theory is similar to other categorization and memory models of cognition in that it relies on vector…

Woollams, Lambon Ralph, Plaut, and Patterson (see record 2007-05396-004) reported detailed data on reading in 51 cases of semantic dementia. They simulated some aspects of these data using a connectionist parallel distributed processing (PDP) triangle model of reading. We argue here that a different model of reading, the dual route cascaded (DRC)…

Exemplar-similarity models such as the exemplar-based random walk (EBRW) model (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997b) were designed to provide a formal account of multidimensional classification choice probabilities and response times (RTs). At the same time, a recurring theme has been to use exemplar models to account for old-new item recognition and to…

Individuals of all ages extract structure from the sequences of patterns they encounter in their environment, an ability that is at the very heart of cognition. Exactly what underlies this ability has been the subject of much debate over the years. A novel mechanism, implicit chunk recognition (ICR), is proposed for sequence segmentation and chunk…