Knowledge Judgment Research Articles

Does This Ring a Bell? Music-cued Retrieval of Semantic Knowledge and Metamemory Judgments

Failed knowledge recall attempts are sometimes accompanied by a strong feeling of imminent success, giving rise to a "tip-of-the-tongue" (TOT) experience. Similar to successful retrieval (i.e., the Know state, K), a TOT commences with strong cue familiarity but involves only partial retrieval of related information. We sought to characterize the cognitive processes and temporal dynamics of these retrieval states and to extend the applicability of previous findings about TOT to the auditory modality. Participants heard 3-sec initial segments of popular songs and were asked to recall their names. EEG was recorded while participants indicated their retrieval state via button press. Stimulus-locked analyses revealed a significant early left fronto-central difference between TOT and K, at 300-550 msec postcue onset. Post hoc analysis revealed that, in this time window, TOT also differed from DK (Don't Know) responses, which themselves were similar to the K responses. This finding indicates that neural processes, which may reflect strategy selection, ease of semantic processing, familiarity-related processes, or conflict monitoring, are indicative of the fate of our knowledge judgments long before we actually execute them.

Treatment of Seepage through Vendarasankulum Twin Reservoir in Eastern Sri Lanka - Cost Comparison of Alternative Techniques

The purpose of this study is to select a more effective technique from ‘upstream cutoff’ and ‘grouting treatment’ for the control of seepage through the Vendarasankulum reservoir. Using engineering judgment, empirical and theoretical knowledge, trapezoidal cross sectional dimensions of layers of different soil materials were determined. For example, the cross section at 490m (from left); SC layer on the U/S side slope has widths, 3m and 12m at bund top and bottom respectively; clay layer in the core has widths 12 m and 3 m at the top and bottom respectively. The effective fetch (1.72 km) and thereby the maximum wave height (0.84m) were computed in order to extract values for thicknesses of riprap (0.45 m) and bedding layer (0.30m). Grouting treatment involves clay-cement grouting in the overburden and 6m deep cement grouting in the rock, requiring a total of 296 grout holes. While the estimated cost of construction of the upstream cutoff is SLR 30.3 million, the same for grouting treatment is SLR 11.3 million, indicating the former option would cost 168 percent more. Therefore, grouting treatment is more economical and sufficient, although upstream cutoff could offer better seepage control.

Knowledge Judgments and Object Memory Processes in Early Childhood: Support for the Dual Criterion Account of Object Nameability Judgment

According to the dual criterion account of early linguistic judgment (Merriman & Lipko, 2008), preschool-aged children who possess more efficient object memory processes should also be more accurate judges of whether various objects have known names. In support of this claim, both the accuracy of object recognition and the speed of object naming were found to be correlated with the accuracy of object nameability judgments, but not with the accuracy of four other mentalistic judgments. Nameability judgments tended to be as accurate as judgments of word familiarity and judgments of the relation between seeing and knowing. These three judgments tended to be more accurate than false-belief judgments.

The limited value of precise tests of the recognition heuristic

AbstractThe recognition heuristic models the adaptive use and dominant role of recognition knowledge in judgment under uncertainty. Of the several predictions that the heuristic makes, empirical tests have predominantly focused on the proposed noncompensatory processing of recognition. Some authors have emphasized that the heuristic needs to be scrutinized based on precise tests of the exclusive use of recognition. Although precise tests have clear merits, I critically evaluate the value of such tests as they are currently employed. First, I argue that using precise measures of the exclusive use of recognition has to go beyond showing that the recognition heuristic—like every model—cannot capture reality completely. Second, I illustrate how precise tests based on response times can lead to unsubstantiated conclusions if the fact that the recognition heuristic does not model the recognition judgment itself is ignored. Finally, I highlight two key but so far neglected aspects of the recognition heuristic: (a) the connection between recognition memory and the recognition heuristic; and (b) the mechanisms underlying the adaptive use of recognition.

ECP05-03 - Treatment of suicidal patients: Legal and ethical aspects

According to WHO estimates, 1.5 million people worldwide will complete suicide in the year 2020 and approximately 10-20 times this number will attempt suicide. Given that suicide still remains the most serious outcome of mental disease, it is essential that psychiatrists are specifically trained regarding legal and ethical aspects related to the treatment of suicidal psychiatric patients.Clinical decisions guided by evidence based knowledge and ethical judgments according to the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence and autonomy intimately interact when a psychiatrist performs suicide risk assessment, recommends treatment and follow- up rehabilitation measures. Ethical dilemmas of respecting acute suicidal or chronic suicidal patient's autonomy when she/he is unable to control self-destructive impulses, confidentiality, Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders and involuntary confinement for the institutional ward will be discussed.Existing research indicates that suicide risk is higher in the immediate aftermath of discharge from the hospital and when patients are transferred to outpatient care without securing the follow- up visit. Psychiatrists are sometimes under considerable pressure, due to economical downsizing of the psychiatric care, to discharge suicidal patients from inpatient care, which can lead to serious legal and ethical repercussions. Following evidence-based procedures is crucial, as well as maintaining a high standard of documentation for all processes and decisions taken.Continuous education of health care staff, scrutiny of existing routines and knowledge about own attitudes towards suicidal patients are needed in order to prevent suicide.

Verifying One's Knowledge of a Name Without Retrieving It: A U-Shaped Relation to Vocabulary Size in Early Childhood

An explicit awareness of gaps in one's vocabulary plays an important role in older children's word learning and reading comprehension and may influence language processing in younger children. The current investigation addressed how preschool-age children identify gaps in their knowledge of object labels. In two studies, preschoolers answered general questions about various depicted objects, then later judged whether they knew names for these and other objects. In each study, participants were more likely to mistakenly report knowing a name for an unnameable object if they had been asked questions about it, or similar objects, earlier in the session. This pre-exposure effect is evidence that cues other than name retrieval itself can influence children's name knowledge judgments. In 4½ year olds (Study 1), the pre-exposure effect was found only among those with smaller vocabularies, whereas in 3½ year olds (Study 2), it was found only among those with larger vocabularies. The reasons why the pre-exposure effect shows a U-shaped relation to vocabulary size are discussed.

Senior Nursing Students' Clinical Judgments in Pain Management

Sustained improvement in pain management depends on new nurses entering the healthcare system with strong practice knowledge and competent clinical judgment. The recent call to revamp nursing education to meet practice realities recommended integrating classroom and clinical teaching using a variety of pedagogies to develop students' clinical judgment skills. Understanding the pain management clinical judgments occurring in practice helps to methodically construct meaningful teaching interventions and guide faculty support of students. The authors discuss their study, and its outcomes, related to the pain management clinical judgments of senior students.

Europäische Gesellschaft für Gastrointestinale Endoskopie (ESGE): Empfehlungen (2009) zum klinischen Einsatz der Video-Kapsel-Endoskopie bei Dünndarm-, Ösophagus- und Kolonerkrankungen

These recommendations on video capsule endos-copy, an emerging technology with an impact on the practice of endoscopy, were developed by the European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ESGE) Guidelines Committee. The first draft of each section was prepared by one or two members of the writing team, who were selected as -experts on the content of that section on the basis of their published work. They used evidence-based methodology, performing MEDLINE and PubMed literature searches to identify relevant clinical studies. Abstracts from scientific meetings were included only if there was no published full paper on a particular topic. If there was disagreement, the first author of the Guideline made the final decision. Recommendations were graded according to the strength of the supporting evidence ( ). The draft guideline was critically reviewed by all authors and submitted to the ESGE councillors for their critical review be-fore approval of the final document. The ESGE Guidelines Committee acknowledges that this doc-ument is based on a critical review of the data available at the time of preparation and that further studies may be needed to clarify some -aspects. Moreover, this Guideline may be revised as necessary to account for changes in technology, new data, or other aspects of clinical practice. This document should be regarded as supplying recommendations only to gastroenterologists in providing care to their patients. It is not a set of rules and should not be construed as establishing a legal standard of care, or as encouraging, advocating, requiring, or discouraging any particular treatment. These recommendations must be interpreted according to the clinician’s knowledge, expertise, and clinical judgment in the management of individual patients and, if necessary, a course of action that varies from recommenda-tions must be undertaken.

Welcome to the 21st Century

Welcome to the 21st Century

Measuring “intuition” in the SRT generation task

We address some concerns related to the use of post-trial attribution judgments, originally developed for artificial grammar learning (AGL), during the version of the serial reaction time (SRT) task used by Fu, Dienes, and Fu (2010). In particular, intuition attributions, which are central to Fu et al.’s arguments, seem problematic: This attribution is likely to be made when stimuli contain several competing sources of information to which subjective feelings could be attributed. The interpretation of intuition attributions in Fu et al.’s SRT generation task is problematic because the procedure involved a 2-element sequence where items varied only in position. In our view, responses categorised as intuitions might have been a variety of guess response where neither judgement knowledge nor structural knowledge were conscious. The results would then be compatible with previous findings showing that people can control the use of unconscious structural knowledge even when judgement knowledge is unconscious.

Can unconscious knowledge allow control in sequence learning?

This paper investigates the conscious status of both the knowledge that an item is legal (judgment knowledge) and the knowledge of why it is legal (structural knowledge) in sequence learning. We compared ability to control use of knowledge (Process Dissociation Procedure) with stated awareness of the knowledge (subjective measures) as measures of the conscious status of knowledge. Experiment 1 showed that when people could control use of judgment knowledge they were indeed conscious of having that knowledge according to their own statements. Yet Experiment 2 showed that people could exert such control over the use of judgment knowledge when claiming they had no structural knowledge: i.e. conscious judgment knowledge could be based on unconscious structural knowledge. Further implicit learning research should be clear over whether judgment or structural knowledge is claimed to be unconscious as the two dissociate in sequence learning.

Research on four kinds of uncertain preference information aggregation approach in group decision making

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to aggregate different preference information in group decision‐making process such as interval preference order, interval utility value, interval number reciprocal comparison matrix, and interval number complementary comparison matrix.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the consistency definitions of four kinds of uncertain preference information are defined. Then, the upper‐ and low errors are introduced to solve the inconsistent decision‐making case. Following that, the weight model for each uncertain preference is proposed, respectively.FindingsThe aggregation approach based on minimal group deviation errors is suggested in order to obtain the utmost consistent opinion. In addition, the consistency judgment level and consistency extent are defined owing to the aggregation result.Research limitations/implicationsThe calculation scale is large, if many decision makers will attend group decision‐making process.Practical implicationsA very useful approach for aggregation of the different preference in group decision‐making case.Originality/valueBecause of differences in knowledge structure, judgment level, and individual preference, decision makers express their judgment preferences via differently structured decision‐making processes. Owing to the complexity and uncertainty of decision‐making problems and the fuzziness of human thought, it is unrealistic to depict complex problems in the certain preference style. For decision‐making preference structures, group decision‐making aggregation approaches include the aggregation on the same kind of preference structure and the different kinds of preference structures. The study on the aggregation of the same kind of preference structure has received a deal of attention, but study into the aggregation of the different kinds of uncertainty preference structures is still a new field.

Research on success factors of pharmacies using FDAHP and gray sequencing: Taiwan as Example

In the past, most pharmacies were founded based on personal knowledge, experience and subjective judgment, without any support from effective evaluation methods regarding success factors. For this reason, it is particularly important and valuable to establish an evaluation method of important factors & indicators for the pharmacies. Through literature review and expert interview, this paper selected and concluded 4 major dimensions and 20 evaluation indicators for pharmacies, and then set up a qualitative and quantitative evaluation indicator model using Fuzzy Delphi Analytic Hierarchy (FDAHP) and Gray Sequencing, thus providing a reference for the evaluation of Taiwan pharmacies.

I Knew It All Along, Unless I Had to Work to Learn What I Know

After receiving knowledge regarding some topic, people usually overestimate their prior topic knowledge. Two experiments investigated whether people would claim less prior knowledge if they worked to earn their present knowledge. In Study 1, students finishing a psychology course claimed less precourse psychology knowledge if they reported devoting more effort toward the course. In Study 2, the knew-it-all-along effect was stronger for participants who were simply given the answers to questions than for participants who studied for 20 minutes to learn the answers. Both cognitive and motivational factors can account for the observed effects of effort investment on retrospective knowledge judgments.

Comment: Can clinical judgment hold its own against scientific knowledge? Comment on Zeldow (2009).

P. B. Zeldow (2009) presents a series of vignettes that make a compelling case for the role of clinical judgment and for the claim that the knowledge of a credentialed practitioner stand up against the credentialed knowledge of scientific research. This comment discusses how the dispute between scientific knowledge and clinical judgment is not unique to psychotherapy but has been extensively discussed in other disciplines, especially medicine and education. Two models of science and practice are presented: a model based on Aristotle's (1999) distinction between techne and phronesis and H. L. Dreyfus and S. E. Dreyfus's (1986) five-stage model of skill acquisition. Both a scientific knowledge base and a model of clinical practice that value the judgment of the expert practitioner are necessary for psychology to be a learned profession. Nevertheless, the gap between science and practice may never be fully closed but will always have irresolvable conflicts that can only be contained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

The politics and bio-ethics of regulatory trust: case-studies of pharmaceuticals

Drawing on case studies from the modern era of pharmaceutical regulation in the UK, US and Europe, I examine how the extent and distribution of trust between regulators, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical profession about drug testing and monitoring influences knowledge and regulatory judgements about the efficacy and safety of prescription drugs. Introducing the concepts of 'acquiescent' and 'investigative' norms of regulatory trust, I demonstrate how investigative norms of regulatory trust-which deter pharmaceutical companies from assuming that their data analyses will be accepted without independent de-construction-drive up bioethical and regulatory standards of drug assessment in the interests of health. By contrast, acquiescent norms of regulatory trust, which are associated with industrial capture and professional closure of interests, promote permissive standards allowing patients to take pharmaceuticals with greater risks to health and less evidence of therapeutic efficacy.

The Naivety of Philosophy

The present paper remains modest in its scope: It seeks only to undertake some exploratory and preparatory investigations with a view to addressing a more difficult and far-reaching question. The issue, in brief, is the following: In the 1920s, Heidegger engages in an incisive and comprehensive critique of techn!, which I shall render here as “production” or “productive comportment,” arguing that it furnishes the foundation and horizon for Greek ontology, and by extension for the entire Western philosophical tradition, a horizon that is problematically reductive because the ontology it gives rise to understands the Being of beings in general in terms of independent presence-at-hand, the appropriate mode of access to which is theoretical apprehension. Not only philosophy and ontology, but science and its outgrowth, modern technicity—itself a monstrous transformation of techn!—would be an almost inexorable consequence of this fateful Greek beginning. The project of a “destructuring of the history of ontology” announced in Being and Time would seek to retrieve and to open up an entirely other dimension of Being, a dimension foreclosed by the Greek beginning and yet awaiting us precisely as the unthought of that beginning and the tradition to which it gave rise. The destructuring would take as its guiding thread an understanding of the Being of Dasein—designating the being that we ourselves in each case are—as radically temporal, never simply present-at-hand, and essentially inaccessible to theoretical apprehension. Yet the critical resource for this analytic of the Being of Dasein was, for the early Heidegger, itself provided by Greek philosophy: It was Aristotle’s insight into the Being of the human being as praxis, and its authentic mode of self-disclosure, phron!sis, that led Heidegger to see the radically different kind of temporality pertaining to human existence, by contrast with the theoretically ascertained time of nature as something present-at-hand, and provided a key insight into the essence of “truth” (aletheia) as unconcealment. Aristotle’s insight into this more primordial sense of aletheia or “truth” as the knowing self-disclosure of our radically temporal Being-in-the-world as praxis, as opposed to truth conceived as a property of logos, judgment, or theoretical knowledge, was a forgotten thread of Greek philosophy that could shed light upon the limits and foundations of the theoretical tradition that dominates the subsequent history of ontology.

Human hazard analysis

PurposeThis paper sets out to outline a human hazard analysis methodology as a tool for managing human error in aircraft maintenance, operations and production. The methodology developed has been used in a slightly modified form on Airbus aircraft programmes. This paper aims to outline a method for managing human error in the field of aircraft design, maintenance and operations. Undertaking the research was motivated by the fact that aviation incidents and accidents still show a high percentage of human‐factors events as key causal factors.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology adopted takes traditional aspects of the aircraft design system safety process, particularly fault tree analysis, and couples them with a structured tabular notation called a human error modes and effects analysis (HEMEA). HEMEA provides data, obtained from domain knowledge, in‐service experience and known error modes, about likely human‐factors events that could cause critical failure modes identified in the fault tree analysis. In essence the fault tree identifies the failure modes, while the HEMEA shows what kind of human‐factors events could trigger the relevant failure.FindingsThe authors found that the methodology works very effectively, but that it is very dependent on locating the relevant expert judgement and domain knowledge..Research limitations/implicationsThe authors found that the methodology works very effectively, but that it is very dependent on locating the relevant expert judgement and domain knowledge. Using the method as a prototype, looking at aspects of a large aircraft fuel system, was very time‐consuming and the industry partner was concerned about the resource implications of implementing this process. Regarding future work, the researchers would like to explore how a knowledge management exercise might capture some of the domain knowledge to reduce the requirement for discursive, seminar‐type sessions with domain experts.Practical implicationsIt was very clear that the sponsors and research partners in the aircraft industry were keen to use this method as part of the safety process. Airbus has used a modified form of the process on at least two programmes.Originality/valueThe authors are aware that the UK MOD uses fault tree analysis that includes human‐factors events. However, the researchers believe that the creation of the human error modes effects analysis is original. On the civil side of the aviation business this is the first time that human error issues have been included for systems other than the flightdeck. The research was clearly of major value to the UK Civil Aviation Authority and Airbus, who were the original sponsors.

Uncertainty Aversion Vs. Competence: An Experimental Market Study

Heath and Tversky (1991, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 4:5–28) posed that reaction to ambiguity is driven by perceived competence. Competence effects may be inconsistent with ambiguity aversion if betting on own judgement is preferred to betting on a chance event, because judgemental probabilities are more ambiguous than chance events. This laboratory experiment analyses whether ambiguity affects prices and volumes in a double auction market, and contrasts ambiguity aversion to competence effects. In order to test for the presence of competence effects, in the experiment uncertainty is tied to the realisation of events about which the decision maker is more or less knowledgeable. Two experiments are presented: in the first, knowledge is exogenous, whereas in the second the knowledge judgement is endogenous. Market prices provide evidence in favour of the competence hypothesis only when competence is self-assessed. Comparable volumes are observed in both experiments.

Reporting About Others' Behavior: The Role of Judgment Strategy, Knowledge, and Regularity

Many surveys rely on peoples' ability to report accurately about others' behavior. However, the mechanism by which this is done is not well understood. We test a conceptual model that posits the processes by which respondents answer questions about others and the accuracy of such reports. Specifically, we examine how judgment strategy moderates the effects of behavioral regularity on reporting accuracy, and explore the effects of knowledge on response accuracy. Findings suggest that respondents' ability to accurately estimate another persons' behavior increases with the regularity of the behavior and the closeness of the relationship. We discuss the theoretical implications for understanding how memory structures about others affect prediction judgment processes, and the practical implications for organizational and consumer surveys.