Do children think of genetic inheritance as deterministic or probabilistic? In two novel tasks, children viewed the eye colors of animal parents and judged and selected possible phenotypes of offspring. Across three studies (N = 353, 162 girls, 172 boys, 2 non-binary; 17 did not report gender) with predominantly White U.S. participants collected…

Humans implicitly pick up on probabilities of stimuli and events, yet it remains unclear how statistical learning builds expectations that affect perception. Across 29 experiments, we examine the influence of task-irrelevant distributions--defined across acoustic frequency--on both tone detection in noise and tone duration judgments. The shape and…

Recent years have seen the development of many novel scoring tools for disease prognosis and prediction. To become accepted for use in clinical applications, these tools have to be validated on external data. In practice, validation is often hampered by logistical issues, resulting in multiple small-sized validation studies. It is therefore…

There is growing consensus that selection history strongly guides spatial attention and is distinct from current goals and physical salience. Here, we focused on target-location probability cueing: when the target is more likely to appear in one region, search performance gradually improves for targets appearing in that region. Probability cueing…

Although humans often multitask, little is known about how the processing of concurrent tasks is managed. The present study investigated whether adjustments in parallel processing during multitasking are local (task-specific) or global (task-unspecific). In three experiments, participants performed one of three tasks: a primary task or, if this…

Publication selection bias undermines the systematic accumulation of evidence. To assess the extent of this problem, we survey over 68,000 meta-analyses containing over 700,000 effect size estimates from medicine (67,386/597,699), environmental sciences (199/12,707), psychology (605/23,563), and economics (327/91,421). Our results indicate that…

As part of the shift towards a more equitable research culture, funders are reconsidering traditional approaches to peer review. In doing so, they seek to minimize bias towards certain research ideas and researcher profiles, to ensure greater inclusion of disadvantaged groups, to improve review quality, to reduce burden, and to enable more…

Do children think of genetic inheritance as deterministic or probabilistic? In two novel tasks, children viewed the eye colors of animal parents and judged and selected possible phenotypes of offspring. Across three studies (N = 353, 162 girls, 172 boys, 2 non-binary; 17 did not report gender) with predominantly White U.S. participants collected…

In a range of settings, human operators make decisions with the assistance of automation, the reliability of which can vary depending upon context. Currently, the processes by which humans track the level of reliability of automation are unclear. In the current study, we test cognitive models of learning that could potentially explain how humans…

We explored a two-stage recognition memory paradigm in which people first make single-item "studied"/"not studied" decisions and then have a chance to correct their errors in forced-choice trials. Each forced-choice trial included one studied word ("target") and one nonstudied word ("lure") that received the…

Standard meta-analysis methods are vulnerable to bias from incomplete reporting of results (both publication and outcome reporting bias) and poor study quality. Several alternative methods have been proposed as being less vulnerable to such biases. To evaluate these claims independently we simulated study results under a broad range of conditions…

Students expose various intuitions in probability comparison and calculation tasks. Large volumes of research looked into these intuitions by categorizing learners' strategies, but fewer studies considered how these intuitions may be associated with learners' judgments. Even fewer examined the mixed effects of multiple intuitions held by the same…

Data reasoning is an essential component of scientific reasoning, as a component of evidence evaluation. In this paper, we outline a model of scientific data reasoning that describes how data sensemaking underlies data reasoning. Data sensemaking, a relatively automatic process rooted in perceptual mechanisms that summarize large quantities of…

Connectives can facilitate the processing of discourse relations by helping comprehenders to infer the intended coherence relation holding between two text spans. Previous experimental studies have focused on pairs of connectives that are very different from one another to be able to compare and formalize the distinguishing effects of these…

People's expectations help them make judgments about the world. In the area of spatial memory, the interaction of existing knowledge with incoming information is best illustrated in the category effect, a bias in positioning a target toward the prototypical location of its region (Huttenlocher et al., 1991). According to Bayesian principles, these…