We study human decision making in a simple forced-choice task that manipulates the frequency and accuracy of available information. Empirically, we find that people make decisions consistent with the advice provided, but that their subjective confidence in their decisions shows 2 interesting properties. First, people's confidence does not depend…

This report is one of three publications from the task analysis study of ornamental horticulture conducted at Cornell University. It was designed to develop a procedural model for task analysis in the area of agribusiness. The personal interview method was used to collect data from businesses within nine identified areas of ornamental…

It was found that significantly more problems in the interview were given by the group receiving the model followed by the ambiguous task instructions. On the other hand, Ss exposed to the same model but who received topic oriented instructions tended to give fewer problems in the interview. (Author)

Examines problems of existing courseware authoring systems and suggests the use of knowledge-based techniques. A prototype knowledge-based representation language called GTE (Generic Tutoring Environment) is described that could form the basis of a full authoring environment, including generic tasks and instructional methods, domain knowledge, and…

Four experiments examined whether studying a single Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) list produces semantic priming for nonstudied critical items (CIs) and semantic + repetition priming for studied associates. After 30 s of mental arithmetic that followed the study of a DRM list, priming was assessed in a lexical decision task when the nonwords were…

Two experiments investigated choice in adult humans on a simulated cooperation task to evaluate a risk-reduction account of sharing based on the energy-budget rule. The energy-budget rule is an optimal foraging model that predicts risk-averse choices when net energy gains exceed energy requirements (positive energy budget) and risk-prone choices…

The authors tested source memory across three conditions, one in which 3 strongly associated primes of a target word were presented in the same source as the target, one in which primes were presented in a different source than the target, and one in which no associates of targets were encoded. In the first 2 experiments, target source memory…

Analysis of binary choice behavior in iterated tasks with immediate feedback reveals robust deviations from maximization that can be described as indications of 3 effects: (a) a payoff variability effect, in which high payoff variability seems to move choice behavior toward random choice; (b) underweighting of rare events, in which alternatives…

The authors studied the role of attention as a selection mechanism in implicit learning by examining the effect on primary sequence learning of performing a demanding target-selection task. Participants were trained on probabilistic sequences in a novel version of the serial reaction time (SRT) task, with dual- and triple-stimulus participants…

A number of studies reported that developmental dyslexics are impaired in speech perception, especially for speech signals consisting of rapid auditory transitions. These studies mostly made use of a categorical-perception task with synthetic-speech samples. In this study, we show that deficits in the perception of synthetic speech do not…

Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means-end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception-action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of…

Two experiments explored the existence and the development of relations between action representations and object representations. A priming paradigm was used in which participants viewed an action pantomime followed by the picture of a tool, the tool being either associated or unassociated with the preceding action. Overall, we observed that the…

There is a common predicament faced by educational designers, that is, the lack of learning design tools for nontraditional pedagogies of learning. Because of this lack of alternatives, educational designers often use traditional design tools (such as task analysis) in contexts where nontraditional learning activities (such as collaborative…

This paper discusses the research into information seeking and its directions at a general level. We approach this topic by analysis and argumentation based on past research in the domain. We begin by presenting a general model of information seeking and retrieval which is used to derive nine broad dimensions that are needed to analyze information…

Typical prevailing task analysis really is skill analysis whose product is a set of generic tasks considered to exhaust or sufficiently sample a skill domain. This approach yields tasks as the base entities of analysis; any understanding of interrelations of structures in the skill architecture in consequence must occur--if at all--above the level…