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Papers by Rachel Stephens

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

The respective early American museums of Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia and Ralph E. W. Ea... more The respective early American museums of Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia and Ralph E. W. Earl in Nashville reveal Enlightenment interest in art and the natural world in parallel ways. Peale inspired Earl’s early efforts in Nashville, and both men’s projects offer insight into the democratic foundation of the history of the American museum. With knowledge of Peale’s institution, Earl founded the Nashville Museum in 1818. The two men’s shared interests in natural philosophy, patronage, fraternal societies, exhibition culture, and early American collecting show them to be avid participants in the American Enlightenment. Telling the story of Earl’s museum for the first time, this article reveals how the effort of each man worked to advance institution building nationwide, enhancing knowledge of the world and helping create an enlightened republic.

Frontiers in Psychology

We present a state-trace analysis of sentence ratings elicited by asking participants to evaluate... more We present a state-trace analysis of sentence ratings elicited by asking participants to evaluate the overall acceptability of a sentence and those elicited by asking participants to focus on structural well-formedness only. Appealing to literature on "grammatical illusion" sentences, we anticipated that a simple instruction manipulation might prompt people to apply qualitatively different kinds of judgment in the two conditions. Although differences consistent with the subjective experience of grammatical illusion dissociations were observed, the state trace analysis of the rating data indicates that responses were still consistent with both judgment types accessing a single underlying factor. These results add to the existing comparisons between analytic and probabilistic modeling approaches to predicting rating judgments.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

A key phenomenon in inductive reasoning is the diversity effect, whereby a novel property is more... more A key phenomenon in inductive reasoning is the diversity effect, whereby a novel property is more likely to be generalized when it is shared by an evidence sample composed of diverse instances than a sample composed of similar instances. We outline a Bayesian model and an experimental study that show that the diversity effect depends on the assumption that samples of evidence were selected by a helpful agent (strong sampling). Inductive arguments with premises containing either diverse or nondiverse evidence samples were presented under different sampling conditions, where instructions and filler items indicated that the samples were selected intentionally (strong sampling) or randomly (weak sampling). A robust diversity effect was found under strong sampling, but was attenuated under weak sampling. As predicted by our Bayesian model, the largest effect of sampling was on arguments with nondiverse evidence, where strong sampling led to more restricted generalization than weak sampling. These results show that the characteristics of evidence that are deemed relevant to an inductive reasoning problem depend on beliefs about how the evidence was generated.

Journal of Mathematical Psychology

This thesis serves as the first in-depth study of the works of Jacksonian-era portraitist Ralph E... more This thesis serves as the first in-depth study of the works of Jacksonian-era portraitist Ralph E.W. Earl (1788-1838). Earl's multi-faceted contributions to the development of culture in Nashville, Tennessee complimented his work in formation of the public image of Andrew Jackson. As a young man from New England, Earl painted portraits there as an itinerant artist, eventually making enough money to travel abroad. He lived and worked in England for five years before spending a year in Paris and returning to the United States in 1816. Determined to paint the heroes of the Battle of New Orleans, Earl traveled to Nashville, Tennessee. He met with great success there and found a clear niche, thereafter settling in the up-and-coming city. Earl opened a museum in addition to painting the portraits of nearly every prominent Nashvillian. He also painted Jackson's portrait dozens of times in Tennessee and then in Washington during his presidency. The focus of this thesis is multifaceted. The history of American art is enriched by the telling of Earl's endeavors, and Earl's career functions as a unique case-study in early American art. Most importantly, Earl's portraits of Jackson helped fashion an acceptable image of the nation's seventh president. Furthermore, Earl's museum and printmaking endeavors expanded early American culture in unique ways. This thesis contributes to the story of American art, history, and culture by revealing the multi-faceted career of a forgotten American cultural hero.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, Jan 26, 2018

When asked to determine whether a syllogistic argument is deductively valid, people are influence... more When asked to determine whether a syllogistic argument is deductively valid, people are influenced by their prior beliefs about the believability of the conclusion. Recently, two competing explanations for this belief bias effect have been proposed, each based on signal detection theory (SDT). Under a explanation, people set more lenient decision criteria for believable than for unbelievable arguments. Under the alternative explanation, believability affects the reasoning stage of processing an argument, with believable and unbelievable arguments differing in subjective strength for both valid and invalid items. Two experiments tested these accounts by asking participants to make validity judgments for categorical syllogisms and to rate their confidence. Conclusion-believability was manipulated both within group (Experiment 1) and between groups (Experiment 2). A novel two-step version of the signal detection model was fit to receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for believ...

Psychological review, Jan 21, 2017

Single-process accounts of reasoning propose that the same cognitive mechanisms underlie inductiv... more Single-process accounts of reasoning propose that the same cognitive mechanisms underlie inductive and deductive inferences. In contrast, dual-process accounts propose that these inferences depend upon 2 qualitatively different mechanisms. To distinguish between these accounts, we derived a set of single-process and dual-process models based on an overarching signal detection framework. We then used signed difference analysis to test each model against data from an argument evaluation task, in which induction and deduction judgments are elicited for sets of valid and invalid arguments. Three data sets were analyzed: data from Singmann and Klauer (2011), a database of argument evaluation studies, and the results of an experiment designed to test model predictions. Of the large set of testable models, we found that almost all could be rejected, including all 2-dimensional models. The only testable model able to account for all 3 data sets was a model with 1 dimension of argument stren...

In applied decision-making contexts such as identity verification in a border security setting or... more In applied decision-making contexts such as identity verification in a border security setting or eyewitness identification from a line-up in a police station, the objectively "correct" decision is unknown. Consequently, much research has focused on exploring potential independent markers of accuracy, such as confidence judgements. Indeed, recent research on recognition memory for faces and on eyewitness identification has demonstrated strong relationships between confidence and accuracy in some situations. However, different confidence-accuracy (CA) relationships have been observed for positive and negative decisions, with positive decisions producing stronger CA calibration than negative decisions. Given that it is important to be able to assess the accuracy of both types of decisions in applied contexts, a new experiment was conducted to better understand this asymmetry, and further explore the usefulness of subjective confidence as an indicator of accuracy. This experi...

Religion and Men's Violence Against Women, 2015

Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, 2010

Category-based feature generalisations are affected by similarity relationships between objects a... more Category-based feature generalisations are affected by similarity relationships between objects and by knowledge of causal relationships between features. However, there is disagreement between recent studies about whether people will simultaneously consider both relationships. To help resolve this discrepancy, the current study addresses an important difference between past experimental designs: the strength of causal relationships between features. Participants were trained on a set of four different kinds of artificial alien animals (with a known perceptual similarity structure), and were taught about three novel features. Participants were taught that either: 1) there were no relationships between the three features; 2) the features shared weak causal relationships; or 3) the features shared strong causal relationships. After training, all participants then made predictions about the features of the four kinds of animals. As expected, it was found that the strength of the causal relationships influenced the degree to which participants' feature predictions were affected by causal and similarity considerations. Three probabilistic graphical models were fit to the participants' predictions, in a preliminary effort to predict participant responses.

Science, 1951

Patrick D. Wall, William J. Fry, Ralph Stephens, Don Tucker, and Jerome Y. Lettvin2 Department of... more Patrick D. Wall, William J. Fry, Ralph Stephens, Don Tucker, and Jerome Y. Lettvin2 Department of Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, and Manteno State Hospital, Maxteno, Illinois Ultrasound will produce ...