Journal
THINKING & REASONING
Volume 19, Issue 1, Pages 27-53Publisher
PSYCHOLOGY PRESS
DOI: 10.1080/13546783.2012.713177
Keywords
Cognitive capacity; Reasoning; Bayesian facilitation
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Although decisions based on uncertain events are critical in everyday life, people perform remarkably badly when reasoning with probabilistic information. A well-documented example is performance on Bayesian reasoning problems, where people fail to take into account the base-rate. However, framing these problems as frequencies improves performance spectacularly. Popular evolutionary theories have explained this facilitation by positing a specialised module that automatically operates on natural frequencies. Here we test the key prediction from these accounts, namely that the performance of the module functions independently from general-purpose reasoning mechanisms. In three experiments we examined the relationship between cognitive capacity and performance on Bayesian reasoning tasks in various question formats, and experimentally manipulated cognitive resources in a dual task paradigm. Results consistently indicated that performance on classical Bayesian reasoning tasks depends on participants available general cognitive capacity. Findings challenge the postulation of an automatically operating frequency module.
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