Papers by Jennifer Trueblood
Over the past several decades, researchers in psychology, neuroscience, marketing, and economics ... more Over the past several decades, researchers in psychology, neuroscience, marketing, and economics have been keen to understand context effects in multi-alternative, multi-attribute decision-making. These effects occur when choices among existing alternatives are altered by the addition of a new alternative to the choice set. The effects violate classic decision theories and have led to the development of computational and mathematical models that explain how the effects arise due to underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. This paper reviews the class of dynamic models of these effects, comparing mechanisms across models. We observe that most models of context effects incorporate an attention mechanism, suggesting attention plays an important role in multi-alternative, multi-attribute decision-making. We conclude by discussing recent empirical studies of attention and context effects and hypothesize that changes in attention could be responsible for recently observed reversals in ...
As information sharing via social media increases, individuals are increasingly exposed to misinf... more As information sharing via social media increases, individuals are increasingly exposed to misinformation that they may utilize when forming beliefs. Over five experiments (total N=819), we investigated whether people could ignore quantitative information when they judged for themselves that it had been fabricated. Participants recruited online viewed sets of values sampled from Gaussian distributions to estimate the underlying means. They attempted to ignore fabricated data, which were outlier values inserted into the value sequences. Results indicated participants were able to detect outliers, and that higher detection confidence was associated with greater estimate accuracy. However, even when participants were most confident that they detected fabricated data, their estimates were still biased in the direction of the outlier. The addition of visual warning cues and different task scenarios did not fully eliminate systematic over- and under-estimation. These findings suggest indi...
Journal of Animal Ecology
Social Psychological and Personality Science
Development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine is widely considered as one of the best paths to end... more Development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine is widely considered as one of the best paths to ending the current health crisis. While the ability to distribute a vaccine in the short-term remains uncertain, the availability of a vaccine alone will not be sufficient to stop disease spread. Instead, policy makers will need to overcome the additional hurdle of rapid widespread adoption. In a large-scale nationally representative survey ( N = 34,200), the current work identifies monetary risk preferences as a correlate of take-up of an anticipated COVID-19 vaccine. A complementary experiment ( N = 1,003) leverages this insight to create effective messaging encouraging vaccine take-up. Individual differences in risk preferences moderate responses to messaging that provides benchmarks for vaccine efficacy (by comparing it to the flu vaccine), while messaging that describes pro-social benefits of vaccination (specifically herd immunity) speeds vaccine take-up irrespective of risk preferenc...
In early March 2020, two crises quickly emerged: the COVID-19 public health crisis and a correspo... more In early March 2020, two crises quickly emerged: the COVID-19 public health crisis and a corresponding economic crisis resulting from business closures and skyrocketing job losses. While the link between socioeconomic status and infectious disease is well-documented, the psychological impacts of financial constraint on perceptions of disease spread and subsequent actions is not well understood. We show that financial constraint predicts people’s beliefs about both their personal risk of infection and the national spread of the virus as well as their social distancing behavior. In addition, we compare the predictive utility of financial constraint to two other commonly studied factors: political partisanship and local disease severity. The strength of the effect of financial constraint equals or eclipses the influence of partisanship on beliefs and is much larger than that of local disease severity. We also show that negative affect partially mediates the relationship between financi...
The target article on robust modeling (Lee et al.) generated a lot of commentary. In this reply, ... more The target article on robust modeling (Lee et al.) generated a lot of commentary. In this reply, we discuss some of the common themes in the commentaries; some are simple points of agreement while others are extensions of a practical or abstract nature. We also address a small number of disagreements or confusions.
Behavior Research Methods
Evidence accumulation models have been one of the most dominant modeling frameworks used to study... more Evidence accumulation models have been one of the most dominant modeling frameworks used to study rapid decisionmaking over the past several decades. These models propose that evidence accumulates from the environment until the evidence for one alternative reaches some threshold, typically associated with caution, triggering a response. However, researchers have recently begun to reconsider the fundamental assumptions of how caution varies with time. In the past, it was typically assumed that levels of caution are independent of time. Recent investigations have however suggested the possibility that levels of caution decrease over time and that this strategy provides more efficient performance under certain conditions. Our study provides the first comprehensive assessment of this newer class of models accounting for time-varying caution to determine how robustly their parameters can be estimated. We assess five overall variants of collapsing threshold/urgency signal models based on the diffusion decision model, linear ballistic accumulator model, and urgency gating model frameworks. We find that estimation of parameters, particularly those associated with caution/urgency modulation are most robust for the linearly collapsing threshold diffusion model followed by an urgency-gating model with a leakage process. All other models considered, particularly those with ballistic accumulation or nonlinear thresholds, are unable to recover their own parameters adequately, making their usage in parameter estimation contexts questionable.
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
Training individuals to make accurate decisions from medical images is a critical component of ed... more Training individuals to make accurate decisions from medical images is a critical component of education in diagnostic pathology. We describe a joint experimental and computational modeling approach to examine the similarities and differences in the cognitive processes of novice participants and experienced participants (pathology residents and pathology faculty) in cancer cell image identification. For this study we collected a bank of hundreds of digital images that were identified by cell type and classified by difficulty by a panel of expert hematopathologists. The key manipulations in our study included examining the speed-accuracy tradeoff as well as the impact of prior expectations on decisions. In addition, our study examined individual differences in decisionmaking by comparing task performance to domain general visual ability (as measured using the Novel Object Memory Test (NOMT) (Richler et al. Cognition 166:42-55, 2017). Using signal detection theory and the diffusion decision model (DDM), we found many similarities between experts and novices in our task. While experts tended to have better discriminability, the two groups responded similarly to time pressure (i.e., reduced caution under speed instructions in the DDM) and to the introduction of a probabilistic cue (i.e., increased response bias in the DDM). These results have important implications for training in this area as well as using novice participants in research on medical image perception and decision-making.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Understanding the cognitive processes involved in multi-alternative, multi-attribute choice is of... more Understanding the cognitive processes involved in multi-alternative, multi-attribute choice is of interest to a wide range of fields including psychology, neuroscience, and economics. Prior investigations in this domain have relied primarily on choice data to compare different theories. Despite numerous such studies, results have largely been inconclusive. Our study uses state-of-the-art response-time modeling and data from 12 different experiments appearing in six different published studies to compare four previously proposed theories/models of these effects: multi-alternative decision field theory (MDFT), the leaky-competing accumulator (LCA), the multi-attribute linear ballistic accumulator (MLBA), and the associative accumulation model (AAM). All four models are, by design, dynamic process models and thus a comprehensive evaluation of their theoretical properties requires quantitative evaluation with both choice and response-time data. Our results show that response-time data is critical at distinguishing among these models and that using choice data alone can lead to inconclusive results for some datasets. In conclusion, we encourage future research to include response-time data in the evaluation of these models.
In an attempt to increase the reliability of empirical findings, psychological scientists have re... more In an attempt to increase the reliability of empirical findings, psychological scientists have recently proposed a number of changes in the practice of experimental psychology. Most current reform efforts have focused on the analysis of data and the reporting of findings for empirical studies. However, a large contingent of psychologists build models that explain psychological processes and test psychological theories using formal psychological models. Some, but not all, recommendations borne out of the broader reform movement bear upon the practice of behavioral or cognitive modeling. In this article, we consider which aspects of the current reform movement are relevant to psychological modelers, and we propose a number of techniques and practices aimed at making psychological modeling more transparent, trusted, and robust.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Mar 13, 2018
We describe and demonstrate an empirical strategy useful for discovering and replicating empirica... more We describe and demonstrate an empirical strategy useful for discovering and replicating empirical effects in psychological science. The method involves the design of a metastudy, in which many independent experimental variables-that may be moderators of an empirical effect-are indiscriminately randomized. Radical randomization yields rich datasets that can be used to test the robustness of an empirical claim to some of the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of experimental protocols and enhances the generalizability of these claims. The strategy is made feasible by advances in hierarchical Bayesian modeling that allow for the pooling of information across unlike experiments and designs and is proposed here as a gold standard for replication research and exploratory research. The practical feasibility of the strategy is demonstrated with a replication of a study on subliminal priming.
Psychonomic bulletin & review, Jan 15, 2018
Most data analyses rely on models. To complement statistical models, psychologists have developed... more Most data analyses rely on models. To complement statistical models, psychologists have developed cognitive models, which translate observed variables into psychologically interesting constructs. Response time models, in particular, assume that response time and accuracy are the observed expression of latent variables including 1) ease of processing, 2) response caution, 3) response bias, and 4) non-decision time. Inferences about these psychological factors hinge upon the validity of the models' parameters. Here, we use a blinded, collaborative approach to assess the validity of such model-based inferences. Seventeen teams of researchers analyzed the same 14 data sets. In each of these two-condition data sets, we manipulated properties of participants' behavior in a two-alternative forced choice task. The contributing teams were blind to the manipulations, and had to infer what aspect of behavior was changed using their method of choice. The contributors chose to employ a v...
Behavior Research Methods
Most past research on sequential sampling models of decision-making have assumed a time homogeneo... more Most past research on sequential sampling models of decision-making have assumed a time homogeneous process (i.e., parameters such as drift rates and boundaries are constant and do not change during the deliberation process). This has largely been due to the theoretical difficulty in testing and fitting more complex models. In recent years, the development of simulation-based modeling approaches matched with Bayesian fitting methodologies has opened the possibility of developing more complex models such as those with time-varying properties. In the present work, we discuss a piecewise variant of the well-studied diffusion decision model (termed pDDM) that allows evidence accumulation rates to change during the deliberation process. Given the complex, time-varying nature of this model, standard Bayesian parameter estimation methodologies cannot be used to fit the model. To overcome this, we apply a recently developed simulation-based, hierarchal Bayesian methodology called the probability density approximation (PDA) method. We provide an analysis of this methodology and present results of parameter recovery experiments to demonstrate the strengths and limitations of this approach. With those established, we fit pDDM to data from a perceptual experiment where information changes during the course of trials. This extensible modeling platform opens the possibility of applying sequential sampling models to a range of complex non-stationary decision tasks.
Psychological review, 2015
Trueblood, Brown, and Heathcote (2014) developed a new model, called the multiattribute linear ba... more Trueblood, Brown, and Heathcote (2014) developed a new model, called the multiattribute linear ballistic accumulator (MLBA), to explain contextual preference reversals in multialternative choice. MLBA was shown to provide good accounts of human behavior through both qualitative analyses and quantitative fitting of choice data. Tsetsos, Chater, and Usher (2015) investigated the ability of MLBA to simultaneously capture 3 prominent context effects (attraction, compromise, and similarity). They concluded that MLBA must set a "fine balance" of competing forces to account for all 3 effects simultaneously and that its predictions are sensitive to the position of the stimuli in the attribute space. Through a new experiment, we show that the 3 effects are very fragile and that only a small subset of people shows all 3 simultaneously. Thus, the predictions that Tsetsos et al. generated from the MLBA model turn out to match closely real data in a new experiment. Support for these pr...
The work presented here uses a simple stochastic model as a cognitive psychometric tool for analy... more The work presented here uses a simple stochastic model as a cognitive psychometric tool for analyzing response time data in the Go/No-Go Discrimination task with motivationally dis-tinct conditions. The parameters of the model inform us of underlying cognitive mechanisms because they have an estab-lished psychological meaning and allow us to quantify a sub-jects ability and response caution. Using these model parame-ters, we focus on the differences between subjects with varying degrees of substance abuse and antisocial behavioral disorders and show that there are reliable differences between the de-cision mechanisms of these subjects. Using data from execu-tive working memory tasks, we postulate that these differences in cognitive processes might be due to differences in working memory capacity. Ultimately, we show that formal cognitive modeling has the potential to provide valuable insights into clinical phenomena that cannot be captured by traditional data analysis techniques.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
Page 1. P. Bruza et al. (Eds.): QI 2009, LNAI 5494, pp. 2943, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Hei... more Page 1. P. Bruza et al. (Eds.): QI 2009, LNAI 5494, pp. 2943, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 Comparison of Quantum and Bayesian Inference Models Jerome R. Busemeyer and Jennifer Trueblood Cognitive ...
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Papers by Jennifer Trueblood