Gonzalez and Dutt (2011) recently reported that trends during sampling, prior to a consequential risky decision, reveal a gradual movement from exploration to exploitation. That is, even when search imposes no immediate costs, people adopt the same pattern manifest in costly search: early exploration followed by later exploitation. From this…

A robust finding in social psychology is that people judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person, a behavior interpreted as showing that people are "unrealistically optimistic" in their judgments of risk concerning future life events. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data…

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…

A rule-plus-exception model (RULEX) of classification learning is proposed. According to RULEX, people learn to classify objects by forming simple logical rules and remembering occasional exceptions to these rules. Because the learning process is stochastic, people will vary in the rules formed and exceptions stored. (SLD)

The theory proposed (recognition-by-components) hypothesizes the perceptual recognition of objects to be a process in which the image of the input is segmented at regions of deep concavity into an arrangement of simple geometric components. Experiments on the perception of briefly presented pictures support the theory. (Author/LMO)

Ratcliff (1985) simulated data from three letter-matching experiments with his diffusion model. The necessity of including a comparison criterion is consistent with the conclusion of Proctor, Rao, and Hurst (1984) that bias of response criteria, alone, is insufficient to generate the fast-same phenomenon. (Author/LMO)

A model of context effects in perception is applied to perception of letters. Perception results from excitatory and inhibitory interactions of detectors for visual features, letters, and words. The model produces facilitation for letters in pronounceable pseudowords as well as words and accounts for rule-governed performance without any rules.…

Several varieties of perceptual independence are investigated, including sampling independence, dimensional orthogonality, stimulus separability and integrality, and performance parity. A general multivariate perceptual theory is developed, and a precise definition of perceptual independence is offered. (Author/LMO)

The aim of this paper is to attempt to develop a neuropsychological theory of attention which is compatible with contemporary theories of human information processing. (Author/RK)

Several models of information integration are developed and analyzed in the context of a prototypical pattern-recognition task. Evaluation, integration, and decision-making processes are specified for each. Simulations and predictions are carried out to provide a measure of identifiability or extent to which they can be distinguished from one…