Plausibility Judgments Research Articles

Property instantiation in conceptual combination.

In four experiments, I examined how a property in one concept is transferred to a second concept during conceptual combination. The results suggest that people instantiate properties: that is, they use a specific representation of a property in the modifier concept to construct a new version of that property that is specific to the combination. If people are instantiating properties, then the modifier property should match its counterpart in the combination to the extent that the modifier and head noun are similar. This observation leads to a variety of predictions (supported by the experiments) about interpretations of similar and dissimilar combinations and about plausibility, preference, and similarity judgments associated with such interpretations. The results argue against an alternative view of transfer that posits that, in general, abstract representations of properties are copied from one concept to another. In this paper, I describe various processing accounts of instantiation and discuss the implications of the instantiation view for theories of metaphor, conceptual combination, and induction.

Effects of syntactic structure and propositional number on patterns of regional cerebral blood flow.

Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to determine regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) as a function of the syntactic form and propositional density of sentences. rCBF increased in the left pars opercularis, part of Broca's area, when subjects processed syntactically more complex sentences. There were no differences in rCBF in the perisylvian association cortex traditionally associated with language processing when subjects made plausibility judgments about sentences with two propositions as compared to sentences with one proposition, but rCBF increased in infero-posterior brain regions. These results suggest that there is a specialization of neural tissue in Broca's area for constructing aspects of the syntactic form of sentences to determine sentence meaning. They also suggest that this specialization is separate from the brain systems that are involved in utilizing the meaning of a sentence that has been understood to accomplish a task.

Semantic Influences on Thematic Role Assignment: Evidence from Normals and Aphasics

We report two studies that examine the role of semantic influences in the assignment of thematic roles. Semantic factors were manipulated by contrasting sentences in which one noun argument was a plausible filler of only one thematic role (e.g., the painting inThe artist disliked the painting) with sentences in which both noun arguments were plausible fillers of both thematic roles (e.g.,The robin ate the insect). Subjects were required to make plausibility judgments to sentences presented auditorily. Experiment 1 examined RTs of normal subjects on the plausibility judgment task. In Experiment 2, the same sentences were presented to aphasic patients identified as “asyntactic” comprehenders. In Experiment 1, RTs were speeded by semantic constraints on thematic assignment, particularly when the role-constrained NP occurred early in the sentence (as inThe painting was disliked by the artist). The aphasic performance patterns in Experiment 2 paralleled those of normal subjects, but in greatly exaggerated fashion. The patients exhibited high error rates on sentences where semantic constraints conflicted with the syntactically based assignments, even on sentences with canonical (S-V-O) word order (e.g., #The deer shot the hunter).

カテゴリに基づく帰納推論

This study clarified factors of premise categories for plausibility judgment of Category Based Induction. A distance factor of premise categories was investigated in Experiment 1 by contrasting a pair of general arguments. The result showed that basically the arguments of which premise categories' distance was larger were judged more plausible. However, it was also indicated that a cluster structure and dimension of premise categories configuration might have affected the plausibility judgment. The dimension factor for plausibility judgment was examined in Experiment 2. The result showed that a majority of subjects had a more plausible judgment on the argument of which premise categories were located in parallel to their own weighted dimension. Experiment 3 examined whether the size dimension, possibly more fundamental than predation, was more important even for predation weighted subjects. The result showed that the number of subjects, who judged more plausible the argument of which premise categories were along size dimension, was not statistically trivial.

The Mechanisms of Confabulation in Schizophrenia

Abstract Confabulation is a newly described abnormality in schizophrenia, but its mechanisms are as yet unclear. Here we describe a detailed investigation of three cases who were previously identified as confabulators. The patients were administered experimental tasks as well as standard neuropsychological tests of memory and executive function in an attempt to elucidate the possible mechanisms. It was found that the severity of cognitive impairment reflects the severity of confabulation, but that memory impairment is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for confabulation. This suggests that confabulation and memory have different substrates. Within the spectrum of executive deficits, impairments in response suppression and response monitoring, but not planning or generation, were consistently associated with confabulation. It is suggested that the stages of this form of confabulation are unlike those previously reported in other patients since faults occur at both input and output. At the input stage, narrative material is encoded in a disorganized manner, while at the output stage this disorganization is compounded by faulty editing processes. This observation highlights the importance of the interaction between encoding and retrieval in schizophrenia confabulation. Impaired plausibility judgements and confabulation are more likely to occur with complex material which requires organization at the input stage.

When plausibility judgments supersede fact retrieval: The example of the odd-even effect on product verification

In the present study, we examined the conditions that favor the plausibility judgment strategy over the retrieval strategy when we verify some statements. In particular, we examined the effect of odd-even status of numbers on subjects' verification of single-digit arithmetic problems. In Experiment 1, we explored how factors such as problem difficulty and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) influence this effect in adults. In Experiment 2, we present evidence that this odd-even effect is also present in elementary school children, although it varies with the age of the children, the difficulty of the problems, and the SOA. We argue that the odd-even information is helpful in arithmetic verification tasks with difficult problems early in the verification processes and that the time course of these effects differs across ages. The present results are consistent with the view that the plausibility strategy is preferred over the retrieval strategy at an early stage of processing and with information that is not quickly accessible. Finally, we discuss the implications of the present experiments for understanding of single-digit arithmetic and for understanding the more general issue of how people coordinate use of multiple strategies.

Impairments of sentence comprehension

We examine two different forms of comprehension impairment, 'semantic dementia' and 'asyntactic comprehension', focusing on the assignment of thematic roles; the determination of who did it to whom. We show, first, that the loss of word meaning does not impede thematic assignment in semantic dementia, demonstrating that syntactic information, along with some knowledge of the verb, is sufficient for the assignment of thematic roles. Studies of normal subjects indicate, however, that this process is normally subject to semantic influences; asked to judge the plausibility of sentences, subjects respond faster when thematic assignment is semantically constrained. The sentence plausibility judgments of 'asyntactic' comprehenders (aphasics with diminished syntactic control over thematic assignment) show increased effects of these semantic constraints. We discuss these results in relation to current issues in sentence processing.

Retrospective and prospective on program impact assessment

Edward Suchman, sociologist, founded our field in 1967 with the book, Evaluation Research: Principles and Practices in Public Service and Social Action Programs. (In the background was Howard Freeman, sociologist, as a program developer for the Russell Sage Foundation.) Suchman cited Campbell and Stanley (1963/1966) as a part of recommended methodology. Thus by a sort of grandfather clause, I became a program evaluation methodologist. This explains in part why I, at age 77.9, am the oldest of the retrospectors and prospectors Midge Smith has assembled. Campbell and Stanley (1963/ 1966) and Campbell (1957) were originally designed to help social psychologists and educators retain the logic of causal inference of the laboratory experiment while moving out into the uncontrolled real world. They tried to specify what “controlled experiments” were controlling, and examine whether or not these threats to validity, these rival hypotheses, could be rendered implausible by other means than random assignment or experimental isolation. (While logical positivist in general orientation, we were post-positivist in recognizing that discretionary judgments of plausibility were the closest one could get to “control” or “proof.“) “Reforms as Experiments” (1969) was my first paper targeted to the program evaluation agenda. Cook and Campbell (1979) fused these foci.

Development of Explanations and Repeated Judgments in An Audit

Prior research suggests that repeated exposure to a statement or the development of an explanation supporting it increases individuals' belief in the plausibility of that statement. This study extended this research by examining how repetition and development of an explanation jointly affect judgments of a statement's plausibility. In this study, subjects (33 men and 16 women) examined financial information about a company and evaluated the plausibility of a statement regarding the company's financial performance that had been made by the management of that company. Prior to evaluating the statement's plausibility, one-half of the subjects also developed an explanation supporting the statement. Fifteen days later, all subjects reevaluated the plausibility of the statement. 24 subjects who had developed a supporting explanation judged the statement to be more plausible than 25 subjects who had not developed an explanation. However, repeated exposure to the statement did not significantly affect subjects' judgments of plausibility.

Independence of question-answering strategy and searched representation

Because many studies of question answering, recall, and recognition have examined script-based messages, a spurious link between answering strategy and searched representation has emerged: Direct retrieval has been associated with the episodic representation of a discourse or a learned list, whereas plausibility judgment has been associated with general knowledge structures. Evidence of the independence of answering strategy and searched representation is presented. First, previous research and intuition both provide examples of the application of either strategy to either type of representation. Second, there is empirical evidence of the application of either strategy to both message text bases and general knowledge. Third, the effects of factors influencing strategy selection are independent of the type of searched representation. It is concluded that answering strategy is independent of the representation to which it is applied.

Question-answering strategies and conceptual knowledge

To test the proposal that question-answering strategy is independent of the type of searched representation, an experiment was designed to demonstrate the application of two strategies, direct retrieval and plausibility judgment, to the same representation. Subjects judged whether or not concept pairs belonged to the same category. The distractor (“no”) items presented either similar (e.g., wren bee) or dissimilar (e.g., wren pea) concept pairs. Dissimilar different distractors should favor the plausibility strategy and result in relatively fast responses; whereas similar different distractors should require direct retrieval. The selected strategy was predicted to be extended to the same pairs, which were identical in the two conditions. Consistent with this analysis, “same” responses were faster in the dissimilar- different condition. Because all answers were based on conceptual knowledge, this outcome supports the proposal that answering strategy is independent of type of searched representation.

Some quantifiers require two-predicate scopes

Predicate calculus has long served as the basis of mathematical logic and has more recently achieved widespread use in artificial intelligence. This system of logic expresses propositions in terms of quantifications, restricting itself to the universal and existential quantifiers “all” and “some,” which appear to be adequate for formalizing mathematics. Systems that aspire to deal with natural language or everyday reasoning, however, must attempt to deal with the full range of quantifiers that occur in such language and reasoning, including, in particular, plurality quantifiers, such as “most,” “many,” and “few.” The logic of such quantifiers forces an extension of the predicate-calculus framework to a system of representation that involves more than one predicate in each quantification. In this paper, we prove this result for the specific case of “most.” Unlike some other arguments that attempt to establish the inadequacy of standard predicate calculus on the basis of intuitive plausibility judgements as to the likely character of human reasoning [11, 19], our result is a theorem of logic itself.

Effects of Presentation Mode on the Comprehension-Monitoring Behaviors of LD Adolescents

This study assessed the effects of presentation mode on the comprehension-monitoring behaviors of LD adolescents. Thirty LD students (grades 9–12) were presented comprehension-monitoring tasks under two presentation-mode conditions: verbalization and listening. Four expository passages about animals were utilized which contained two types of embedded errors (within-sentence and between-sentence). As an on-line measure of monitoring, subjects were asked to identify embedded passage inconsistencies that interfered with meaning. As post-reading measures, two statement identification tasks were used to assess the subjects' awareness of passage information and statement plausibility. While multivariate analyses revealed no significant main effects for the verbalization condition, significant effects were found for the listening condition with the embedded error tasks. In addition, significant interaction effects for detection of embedded errors and judgments of statement plausibility suggested that the multimodal presentations acted to depress scores. Implications are drawn for future research and ucational practice.

Semantic-memory sources of episodic retrieval failure.

In a cued-recall paradigm, retrieval blocking was investigated as a source of episodic retrieval failure. Each unrelated-interference (UR-I) word pair (e.g., “nurse-dollar”) had its own “competitive alternative” (e.g., “doctor’), which not only was strongly related to the cue word, but also possessed the same first two letters and final letter as did the target word. None of the unrelated-control (UR-C) word pairs (e.g., “clock-dollar”) had such an alternative. Cued recall substantially increased from the cue-word-only (e.g., “nurse- ”) to the three-letters-also cue condition (e.g., “nurse-do___r”) for the UR-C but not for the UR-I word pairs. Instead, subjects frequently reported the competitive alternatives in place of the UR-I target words in the three-letters-also cue condition. It was suggested that, relying on the primary plausibility judgment, subjects falsely accepted the competitive alternatives while the UR-I target words were blocked from retrieval by the potent retrieval of these plausible alternatives.

Plausibility judgments versus fact retrieval: Alternative strategies for sentence verification.

Plausibility judgments versus fact retrieval: Alternative strategies for sentence verification.

Plausibility judgments versus fact retrieval: Alternative strategies for sentence verification.

Plausibility judgments versus fact retrieval: Alternative strategies for sentence verification.

The role of elaborations in memory for prose

In two experiments, subjects read stories and were asked to make plausibility judgments about statements with respect to the stories. The inherent plausibility of the queried statements, the amount of attention subjects focused on information necessary for making a judgment, and the interval between presentation of the relevant story information and the test probe were varied orthogonally. The pattern of latencies obtained to make these judgments cast strong doubt on the notion that question answering is typically accomplished by searching for a single fact in memory. Rather, people seem to retrieve any relevant, available information and then use this to compute whether a statement seems true. The independent variables in these experiments can be interpreted according to whether they affect the retrieval or the judgment phase.

The Influence of Attitude on Judgments of Plausibility: a Replication and Extension

The Influence of Attitude on Judgments of Plausibility: a Replication and Extension

Racial attitude as a determinant of judgments of plausibility.

(1966). Racial Attitude as a Determinant of Judgments of Plausibility. The Journal of Social Psychology: Vol. 70, No. 1, pp. 139-147.

Effect of attitude on judgments of plausibility.

Effect of attitude on judgments of plausibility.