Misleading Strategy Research Articles

Inhibiting the Whole Number Bias in a Fraction Comparison Task: An Event-Related Potential Study.

IntroductionPeople often use heuristics derived from natural number tasks to solve fraction comparison tasks. For instance, one may falsely consider a fraction with a larger natural number to be the larger in magnitude, as in the case of 1/5 vs 1/4. We hypothesized that inhibitory control was needed to overcome this type of bias.MethodsTo test the hypothesis, Event-related potentials (ERP) were collected when participants were conducting fraction comparison tasks that designed with the negative priming paradigm. Twenty-eight adult participants performed three types of fraction comparison tasks: congruent items, incongruent items and neutral items.ResultsWe found a negative priming effect in terms of response time. Consistently, ERP results demonstrated larger N1 and N2 amplitudes and a smaller P3 amplitude in the test trial than in the control trial.ConclusionThese findings indicated that adults still need to inhibit the “larger natural number-larger fraction” misleading strategy when solving fraction comparison tasks with common components.

Adolescents and adults need inhibitory control to compare fractions

For children, adolescents and educated adults, comparing fractions with common numerators (e.g., 4/5 vs. 4/9) is more challenging than comparing fractions with common denominators (e.g., 3/4 vs. 6/4) or fractions with no common components (e.g., 5/7 vs. 6/2). Errors are related to the tendency to rely on the “greater the whole number, the greater the fraction” strategy, according to which 4/9 seems larger than 4/5 because 9 is larger than 5. We aimed to determine whether the ability of adolescents and educated adults to compare fractions with common numerators was rooted in part in their ability to inhibit the use of this misleading strategy by adapting the negative priming paradigm. We found that participants were slower to compare the magnitude of two fractions with common denominators after they compared the magnitude of two fractions with common numerators than after they decided which of two fractions possessed a denominator larger than the numerator. The negative priming effects reported suggest that inhibitory control is needed at all ages to avoid errors when comparing fractions with common numerators.

Inhibitory control is needed to overcome written verb inflection errors: Evidence from a developmental negative priming study

Systematic written verb inflection errors occur in sentences such as the dog of the neighbors come (instead of comes). In French, similar verb inflection errors are observed in sentences such as I eat them because the plural pronoun is placed between the subject pronoun and the verb and has the same written morphology as the determiner providing the noun inflection. Thus, subjects can erroneously inflect the verb with the plural mark for nouns. We investigated whether these verb inflection errors are related to the ability to inhibit this misleading strategy. We designed a variant of the negative priming (NP) paradigm with children, adolescents and adults. NP effects are observed in all participants. Critically, the magnitude of the NP effects decreased between children and adolescents. These results suggest that learning verb inflections relies not only on the acquisition of declarative grammatical knowledge but also on the ability to inhibit an overlearned strategy.

The role of consciousness in triggering intellectual habits.

The role of consciousness in triggering intellectual habits.

Lost in Translation: WhyGeneralizedDarwinism is a Misleading Strategy for Studying Socioeconomic Evolution

AbstractThe article is based on Lewontin's distinction between transformational and variational evolution. Given that transformational evolution is dominant in the social realm while variational evolution reigns in the organic world, the question is ifHodgson andKnudsen'sGeneralizedDarwinism bridges the ontological gap between the two types of evolution. It is argued that the three successive strategies of the authors—deconstruction ofLamarckism, appropriation of the Price equation, redefinition of the replication notion—are all based on controversial semantic innovations. Most importantly, it is shown thatGeneralizedDarwinism, in its effort to address the transformational character of social evolution through the notion of generative replication, is compelled to radically restrict the importance ofDarwinian natural selection.

Inhibitory control is needed for the resolution of arithmetic word problems: A developmental negative priming study.

Solving simple arithmetic word problems is a major ability that children must acquire throughout the primary-grade mathematics curriculum. However, this skill is often challenging for them. For instance, “unknown referent problems” are more difficult to solve than “unknown compare problems.” In unknown compare problems, the relational term (e.g., “more than”) is consistent with the arithmetic operation (e.g., addition) required to find the solution, whereas in unknown referent problems, the relational term (e.g., “more than”) is inconsistent with the arithmetic operation (i.e., subtraction). To determine whether solving unknown referent problems relies on the ability to inhibit the heuristic “add if more, subtract if less” strategy, we devised a negative priming (NP) paradigm for children, adolescents, and adults. For each test trial, an unknown referent problem served as a prime, in which the inhibition of the heuristic strategy was necessary and was immediately followed by an unknown compare problem that served as a probe, in which the heuristic strategy became the appropriate strategy to use. For each control trial, a neutral problem served as a prime and was followed by an unknown compare problem as a probe. All participants performed the unknown compare problems more slowly when they were preceded by unknown referent problems, which reflected typical NP effects. Our results confirm that success in completing unknown referent problems reveals not only participants’ ability to grasp the underlying logic of the problem but also their ability to inhibit a misleading strategy. This study sheds light on the importance of inhibitory control in learning mathematics.

Inhibitory control in number-conservation and class-inclusion tasks: A neo-Piagetian inter-task priming study

We investigated whether success in number-conservation and class-inclusion tasks relies on a general ability to inhibit misleading strategies. Two groups of 10-year-olds performed inter-task priming between computerized versions of class-inclusion and number-conservation tasks (Experiment 1). In one group, the class-inclusion task served as a prime and the number-conservation task as an assessment probe and vice versa in the other group. Response times were shorter in the number-conservation task when performed after the class-inclusion task (and vice versa in the other group) than in control prime-probe sequences in which the primes did not require the inhibition of a misleading strategy. Experiment 2 showed that these inter-task priming effects did not simply reflect that class inclusion and number conservation rely on the reversibility of concrete operations as Piaget would have hypothesized. Taken together the results are consistent with the neo-Piagetian assumption that cognitive development is rooted in both the acquisition of knowledge of incremental complexity and the ability to resist (inhibit) previous knowledge. Critically, the present finding suggests that the inhibitory ability is not domain- or strategy-specific.

Vaporware: a tug of war between market freezing and cannibalisation

Vaporware is a misleading preannouncement strategy. The established view about such a marketing strategy is that it is commonly used by dominant firms. The literature also suggests that firms engage in vaporware in order to deter the entry of potential competitors. This study challenges these conventional wisdoms and shows that the optimality of the vaporware strategy depends on the tradeoff between the market freezing effect and the cannibalisation effect. Specifically, the study finds that vaporware is only optimal for a firm with a sufficiently low market share and for a new product with a sufficiently high quality improvement over the existing product. To eliminate the vaporware incentive, this study proposes a signalling price mechanism. The analysis shows counterintuitively that a lower price signals better product delivery capability.

Negative priming effect after inhibition of weight/number interference in a Piaget-like task

Piagetian tasks have more to do with the child's ability to inhibit interference than they do with the ability to grasp their underlying logic. Here we used a chronometric paradigm with 11-year-olds, who succeed in Piaget's conservation-of-weight task, to test the role of cognitive inhibition in a priming version of this classical task. The experimental design was such that the misleading strategy “number-equals-weight” to inhibit on the prime (a Piaget-like item with weight/number interference) became a congruent strategy to activate on the probe (a subsequent item where weight and number covaried). A negative priming effect of 142 ms was observed for the prime-probe sequence. This result is consistent with the prediction that success on Piaget-like tasks (the prime) requires an inhibition process.

Negative Priming in a Numerical Piaget-like Task as Evidenced by ERP

Inhibition is a key executive function in adults and children for the acquisition and expression of cognitive abilities. Using event-related potentials in a priming adaptation of a Piaget-like numerical task taken from developmental psychology, we report a negative priming effect in adults measured just after the cognitive inhibition of a misleading strategy, the visuospatial length-equals-number bias. This effect was determined in the N200 information processing stage through increased N200 amplitude. We show here that for accuracy in numerical quantification, the adult brain still had to control the child-like cognition biases that are stored in a kind of "developmental memory."

Cognitive inhibition of number/length interference in a Piaget-like task in young adults: evidence from ERPs and fMRI.

We sought to determine whether the neural traces of a previous cognitive developmental stage could be evidenced in young adults. In order to do so, 12 young adults underwent two functional imaging acquisitions (EEG then fMRI). During each session, two experimental conditions were applied: a Piaget-like task with number/length interference (INT), and a reference task with number/length covariation (COV). To succeed at Piaget's numerical task, which children under the age of 7 years usually fail, the subjects had to inhibit a misleading strategy, namely, the visuospatial length-equals-number bias, a quantification heuristic that is often relevant and that continues to be used through adulthood. Behavioral data confirmed that although there was an automation in the young adult subjects as assessed by the very high number of accurate responses (>97%), the inhibition of the "length equals number strategy" had a cognitive cost, as the reaction times were significantly higher in INT than in COV (with a difference of 230 ms). The event-related potential results acquired during the first session showed electrophysiological markers of the cognitive inhibition of the number/length interference. Indeed, the frontal N2 was greater during INT than during COV, and a P3(late)/P6 was detected only during INT. During the fMRI session, a greater activation of unimodal areas (the right middle and superior occipital cortex) and in the ventral route (the left inferior temporal cortex) was observed in INT than in COV. These results seem to indicate that when fully automated in adults, inhibition processes might take place in unimodal areas.

When should inpatient child and adolescent psychiatric treatment be terminated?

As up to now no thorough empirical investigation of the length of stay during inpatient treatment exists, the criteria for the decision to terminate inpatient treatment were studied. The opinions of experts in child psychiatry were collected by means of a three-part questionnaire that included a general section together with questions concerning the respective profession group of each expert, a structured section, and a section with open questions. 200 questionnaires were mailed to members of different professional groups at all hospitals for child and adolescent psychiatry in Lower Saxony and Bremen. 112 questionnaires were returned. Data were evaluated descriptively and by means of analyses of variance to determine whether the assessment patterns differ among the various groups. Complex criteria were found by attributing answers to both the structural and the open questions, which included patient-related aspects (particularly the course of symptoms and the child's/adolescent's development of competence), conditions in the family, administrative influences (aftercare and post-discharge placement), problems in the therapeutic setting, aspects of group dynamics between patients and staff, as well as problems involving motivation and compliance. The decision patterns in the professional groups did not differ. To reduce the length of inpatient treatment to criteria in accordance with DRGs would be to overlook essential professional aspects of a qualified decision process and thus constitute a misleading strategy with regard to effectiveness and efficiency. The use of the criteria found here as components of a quality management process might be a better way to achieve this goal.

Negative priming effect after inhibition of number/length interference in a Piaget‐like task

According to Dempster, Piagetian tasks have more to do with the child’s ability to resist (inhibit) interference than they do with the ability to grasp their underlying logic. Here we used a chronometric paradigm with 9‐year‐olds, who succeed in Piaget’s conservation of number task, to test the role of cognitive inhibition in a priming version of this classical task. The experimental design was such that the misleading strategy ‘length‐equals‐number’ to inhibit on the prime (a Piaget‐like item with number/length interference) became a congruent strategy to activate on the probe (a subsequent item where number and length covaried). A negative priming effect of 158 ms was observed for the prime–probe sequence. This result confirms that success on Piaget‐like tasks (the prime) requires an inhibition process.

Surgeon-Specific Wound Infection Rates: A Potentially Dangerous and Misleading Strategy

Surgeon-Specific Wound Infection Rates: A Potentially Dangerous and Misleading Strategy