Framing
framing
Face matching and decision making: The influence of framing, task presentation and criterion placement
Many situations rely on the accurate identification of people with whom we are unfamiliar. For example, security at airports or in police investigations require the identification of individuals from photo-ID. Yet, the identification of unfamiliar faces is error prone, even for practitioners who routinely perform this task. Indeed, even training protocols often yield no discernible improvement. The challenge of unfamiliar face identification is often thought of as a perceptual problem; however, this assumption ignores the potential role of decision-making and its contributing factors (e.g., criterion placement). In this talk, I am going to present a series of experiments that investigate the role of decision-making in face identification.
NMC4 Short Talk: Neural Representation: Bridging Neuroscience and Philosophy
We understand the brain in representational terms. E.g., we understand spatial navigation by appealing to the spatial properties that hippocampal cells represent, and the operations hippocampal circuits perform on those representations (Moser et al., 2008). Philosophers have been concerned with the nature of representation, and recently neuroscientists entered the debate, focusing specifically on neural representations. (Baker & Lansdell, n.d.; Egan, 2019; Piccinini & Shagrir, 2014; Poldrack, 2020; Shagrir, 2001). We want to know what representations are, how to discover them in the brain, and why they matter so much for our understanding of the brain. Those questions are framed in a traditional philosophical way: we start with explanations that use representational notions, and to more deeply understand those explanations we ask, what are representations — what is the definition of representation? What is it for some bit of neural activity to be a representation? I argue that there is an alternative, and much more fruitful, approach. Rather than asking what representations are, we should ask what the use of representational *notions* allows us to do in neuroscience — what thinking in representational terms helps scientists do or explain. I argue that this framing offers more fruitful ground for interdisciplinary collaboration by distinguishing the philosophical concerns that have a place in neuroscience from those that don’t (namely the definitional or metaphysical questions about representation). And I argue for a particular view of representational notions: they allow us to impose the structure of one domain onto another as a model of its causal structue. So, e.g., thinking about the hippocampus as representing spatial properties is a way of taking structures in those spatial properties, and projecting those structures (and algorithms that would implement them) them onto the brain as models of its causal structure.
Why does online collaboration work? Insights into sequential collaboration
The last two decades have seen a rise in online projects such as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap in which people collaborate to create a common product. Contributors in such projects often work together sequentially. Essentially, the first contributor generates an entry (e.g., a Wikipedia article) independently which is then adjusted in the following by other contributors by adding or correcting information. We refer to this way of working together as sequential collaboration. This process has not yet been studied in the context of judgment and decision making even though research has demonstrated that Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap yield very accurate information. In this talk, I give first insights into the structure of sequential collaboration, how adjusting each other’s judgments can yield more accurate final estimates, which boundary conditions need to be met, and which underlying mechanisms may be responsible for successful collaboration. A preprint is available at https://psyarxiv.com/w4xdk/
Attentional Foundations of Framing Effects
Framing effects in individual decision-making have puzzled economists for decades because they are hard, if at all, to explain with rational choice theories. Why should mere changes in the description of a choice problem affect decision-making? Here, we examine the hypothesis that changes in framing cause changes in the allocation of attention to the different options – measured via eye-tracking – and give rise to changes in decision-making. We document that the framing of a sure alternative as a gain – as opposed to a loss – in a risk-taking task increases the attentional advantage of the sure option and induces a higher choice frequency of that option – a finding that is predicted by the attentional drift-diffusion model (aDDM). The model also correctly predicts other key findings such as that the increased attentional advantage of the sure option in the gain frame should also lead quicker decisions in this frame. In addition, the data reveal that increasing risk aversion at higher stake sizes may also be driven by attentional processes because the sure option receives significantly more attention – regardless of frame – at higher stakes. We also corroborate the causal impact of framing-induced changes of attention on choice with an additional experiment that manipulates attention exogenously. Finally, to study the precise mechanisms underlying the framing effect we structurally estimate an aDDM that allows for frame and option-dependent parameters. The estimation results indicate that – in addition to the direct effects of framing-induced changes in attention on choice – the gain frame also causes (i) an increase in the attentional discount of the gamble and (ii) an increased concavity of utility. Our findings suggest that the traditional explanation of framing effects in risky choice in terms of a more concave value function in the gain domain is seriously incomplete and that attentional mechanisms as hypothesized in the aDDM play a key role.