There is a wealth of evidence that people's reasoning is influenced by explanatory considerations. Little is known, however, about the exact form this influence takes, for instance about whether the influence is unsystematic or because of people's following some rule. Three experiments investigate the descriptive adequacy of a precise proposal to…

Humans' face ability develops and matures with extensive experience in perceiving, recognizing, and interacting with faces that move most of the time. However, how facial movements affect 1 core aspect of face ability--holistic face processing--remains unclear. Here we investigated the influence of rigid facial motion on holistic and part-based…

Reasoning and inference are well-studied aspects of basic cognition that have been explained as statistically optimal Bayesian inference. Using a simplified experimental design, we conducted quantitative comparisons between Bayesian inference and human inference at the level of individuals. In 3 experiments, with more than 13,000 participants, we…

We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model for analyzing multi-site experimental fMRI studies. Our method takes the hierarchical structure of the data (subjects are nested within sites, and there are multiple observations per subject) into account and allows for modeling between-site variation. Using posterior predictive model checking and model…

A new process model of the interplay between memory and judgment processes was recently suggested, assuming that retrieval fluency--that is, the speed with which objects are recognized--will determine inferences concerning such objects in a single-cue fashion. This aspect of the fluency heuristic, an extension of the recognition heuristic, has…