Rick Thomas - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Rick Thomas

Human Factors Issues in Combat Identification, 2017

Complex tasks across fields such as aviation, military, and healthcare require operators to devel... more Complex tasks across fields such as aviation, military, and healthcare require operators to develop highly skilled and automatic levels of performance in response to critical stimuli in the environment. This research extends the findings from the dual-process theory of automaticity by considering the effects of two aspects in a complex visual search task: the stimulus mapping and the response mapping. In realistic visual search tasks, targets are often defined by a combination of cues needed for search (eg, altitude and speed), and ...

Aggregating multiple estimates from the same individual has been shown to result in more accurate... more Aggregating multiple estimates from the same individual has been shown to result in more accurate estimates--a phenomenon known as the wisdom of the crowd within (Vul & Pashler, 2008). Accuracy improves when there is a time delay between estimates, suggesting that the passage of time interferes with one's ability to remember and anchor on initial estimates. THis research has implications in domains where individuals must rely on their own, independent knowledge to forecast future events. That is, rather than collaborate with or aggregate across estimates from multiple judges, an individual can simulate the benefits related to crowd wisdom by sampling repeatedly from their own knowledge. However, the time delays necessary to achieve this advantage may not be realistic in domains with high time constraints. The purpose of the current research project is to explore other methods for introducing interference between estimates.

probability theory, have held the decision sciences captive with the likes of Bernoulli, Laplace,... more probability theory, have held the decision sciences captive with the likes of Bernoulli, Laplace, Von Neumann, Savage and others, developing normative or rational models of decision making. A weakness of this approach, however, is that it disregards the cognitive capabilities of the agent and only considers the environment in which behavior takes place. In contrast, cognitive scientists have often failed to recognize that the processes they're trying to model take place in an uncertain world involving serious consequences. Thus, cognition in the real world needs to confront decisionmaking topics. In this symposium, we survey several recent examples of the emerging field we call Cognitive Decision Theory – a branch of decision theory in which models of judgment and decision making are built from principles of cognition rather than axioms of rationality. As the talks in the symposium illustrate, the application of cognitive models to understanding judgment and decision making add...

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

We argue that providing cumulative risk as an estimate of the uncertainty in dynamically changing... more We argue that providing cumulative risk as an estimate of the uncertainty in dynamically changing risky environments can help decision-makers meet mission-critical goals. Specifically, we constructed a simplified aviation-like weather decision-making task incorporating Next-Generation Radar (NEXRAD) images of convective weather. NEXRAD radar images provide information about geographically referenced precipitation. NEXRAD radar images are used by both pilots and laypeople to support decision-making about the level of risk posed by future weather-hazard movements. Using NEXRAD, people and professionals have to infer the uncertainty in the meteorological information to understand current hazards and extrapolate future conditions. Recent advancements in meteorology modeling afford the possibility of providing uncertainty information concerning hazardous weather for the current flight. Although there are systematic biases that plague people’s use of uncertainty information, there is evid...

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2018

Although the fast and frugal heuristics have been studied extensively, relatively little attentio... more Although the fast and frugal heuristics have been studied extensively, relatively little attention has been paid to how cues are generated to be used within the heuristics. The goal of this paper is to propose and test a memory‐based model of how cues are generated and used in cue‐based inferences. The current study advances theory by integrating the fast and frugal heuristics with HyGene, a memory‐based model of how decision makers generate and evaluate hypotheses. Using archival data in which memory retrieval variables were not directly manipulated, we demonstrate that participants' cue selection behavior is consistent with memory‐based retrieval. Further, by directly manipulating memory retrieval within a cue‐based stock‐forecasting task, we demonstrate that memory processes underlie cue use. Participants' cue use varied depending on the relationship between cue validity and the frequency with which the cues were seen during learning. The HyGene model provided the best ac...

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

At present, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is developing new technologies th... more At present, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is developing new technologies that could offer explicit estimates of the probability that a thunderstorm could produce a tornado up to an hour ahead of the event. Such technologies could radically alter how risk spaces are represented and understood by those who must decide whether or not to take protective action. In addition, there are relatively few studies that examine mapped representations of uncertainty in weather information or the influence of this uncertainty information in weather hazard decision making. To address these gaps, this study presents research subjects with a variety of representations of uncertainty based on the precepts of cartography and information visualization. We propose and test for the existence of three geospatial framing effects that potentially influence subjective estimates of risk: distance from a hazard, warning boundary inclusion or exclusion, and symbolic color coding of uncertainty information. Using a series of computer-aided geographic experiments with a large sample (N ¼ 5,564) of the U.S. population, we find evidence for the existence of each of the three proposed geospatial framing effects. Two of these framings are controlled by the mapmaker-in this case, the weather forecaster-and thus should be considered during the development stages of new products. We discuss the practical implications of the experimental study for current and future tornado warning practices.

PloS one, 2018

An important theoretical question in decision making concerns the nature of cue-generation: What ... more An important theoretical question in decision making concerns the nature of cue-generation: What mechanism drives the generation of cues used to make inferences? Most models of decision making assume that the properties of cues, often cue validity, initiate a set of dynamic pre-decision processes. In two studies, we test how memory accessibility affects cue use by manipulating both ecological cue validity and cue accessibility in a stock-forecasting task. Cue accessibility was manipulated by the pattern of accurate cue discriminations within experiment blocks of the learning phase of the experiments. Specifically, we manipulated the serial positions in which the cues accurately discriminated while holding overall cue validity constant. At test, participants preferred cues that discriminated early in the learning phase-a kind of primacy effect. The findings suggest that cue use is influenced by memory retrieval mechanisms and that cue use is not solely determined by cue validity. The...

Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), Jan 11, 2017

We examine whether constraining memory retrieval processes affects performance in a cued recall v... more We examine whether constraining memory retrieval processes affects performance in a cued recall visual search task. In the visual search task, participants are first presented with a memory prompt followed by a search array. The memory prompt provides diagnostic information regarding a critical aspect of the target (its colour). We assume that upon the presentation of the memory prompt, participants retrieve and maintain hypotheses (i.e., potential target characteristics) in working memory in order to improve their search efficiency. By constraining retrieval through the manipulation of time pressure (Experiments 1A and 1B) or a concurrent working memory task (Experiments 2A, 2B, and 2C), we directly test the involvement of working memory in visual search. We find some evidence that visual search is less efficient under conditions in which participants were likely to be maintaining fewer hypotheses in working memory (Experiments 1A, 2A, and 2C), suggesting that the retrieval of repr...

The British journal of mathematical and statistical psychology, Jan 27, 2017

Despite the fact that data and theories in the social, behavioural, and health sciences are often... more Despite the fact that data and theories in the social, behavioural, and health sciences are often represented on an ordinal scale, there has been relatively little emphasis on modelling ordinal properties. The most common analytic framework used in psychological science is the general linear model, whose variants include ANOVA, MANOVA, and ordinary linear regression. While these methods are designed to provide the best fit to the metric properties of the data, they are not designed to maximally model ordinal properties. In this paper, we develop an order-constrained linear least-squares (OCLO) optimization algorithm that maximizes the linear least-squares fit to the data conditional on maximizing the ordinal fit based on Kendall's τ. The algorithm builds on the maximum rank correlation estimator (Han, 1987, Journal of Econometrics, 35, 303) and the general monotone model (Dougherty & Thomas, 2012, Psychological Review, 119, 321). Analyses of simulated data indicate that when mod...

Book synopsis: The International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM) is the premier conferenc... more Book synopsis: The International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM) is the premier conference for research on computational models and computation-based theories of human behavior. ICCM is a forum for presenting, discussing, and evaluating the complete spectrum of cognitive modeling approaches, including connectionism, symbolic modeling, dynamical systems, Bayesian modeling, and cognitive architectures. ICCM includes basic and applied research, across a wide variety of domains, ranging from low-level perception and attention to higher-level problem-solving and learning. Online-Version published by Universitatsverlag der TU Berlin (www.univerlag.tu-berlin.de)

Sociological Methodology, 2015

We argue that the mismatch between data and analytical methods, along with common practices for d... more We argue that the mismatch between data and analytical methods, along with common practices for dealing with “messy” data, can lead to inaccurate conclusions. Specifically, using previously published data on racial bias and culture of honor, we show that manifest effects, and therefore theoretical conclusions, are highly dependent on how researchers decide to handle extreme scores and nonlinearities when data are analyzed with traditional approaches. Within LS approaches, statistical effects appeared or disappeared on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of as little as 1.5% (3 of 198) of the data, and highly predictive variables were masked by nonlinearities. We then demonstrate a new statistical modeling technique called the general monotone model (GeMM) and show that it has a number of desirable properties that may make it more appropriate for modeling messy data: It is more robust to extreme scores, less affected by outlier analyses, and more robust to violations of linearity...

Weather and Forecasting, 2015

The ongoing Phased Array Radar Innovative Sensing Experiment (PARISE) investigates the impacts of... more The ongoing Phased Array Radar Innovative Sensing Experiment (PARISE) investigates the impacts of higher-temporal-resolution radar data on the warning decision process of NWS forecasters. Twelve NWS forecasters participated in the 2013 PARISE and were assigned to either a control (5-min updates) or an experimental (1-min updates) group. Participants worked two case studies in simulated real time. The first case presented a marginally severe hail event, and the second case presented a severe hail and wind event. While working each event, participants made decisions regarding the detection, identification, and reidentification of severe weather. These three levels compose what has now been termed the compound warning decision process. Decisions were verified with respect to the three levels of the compound warning decision process and the experimental group obtained a lower mean false alarm ratio than the control group throughout both cases. The experimental group also obtained a high...

Memory & Cognition, 2014

We used a model of hypothesis generation (called HyGene; Thomas, Dougherty, Sprenger, & Harbison,... more We used a model of hypothesis generation (called HyGene; Thomas, Dougherty, Sprenger, & Harbison, 2008) to make predictions regarding the deployment of attention (as assessed via eye movements) afforded by the cued recall of target characteristics before the onset of a search array. On each trial, while being eyetracked, participants were first presented with a memory prompt that was diagnostic regarding the target's color in a subsequently presented search array. We assume that the memory prompts led to the generation of hypotheses (i.e., potential target characteristics) from longterm memory into working memory to guide attentional processes and ocular-motor behavior. However, given that multiple hypotheses might be generated in response to a prompt, it has been unclear how the focal hypothesis (i.e., the hypothesis that exerts the most influence on search) affects search behavior. We tested two possibilities using first fixation data, with the assumption that the first item fixated within a search array was the focal hypothesis. We found that a model assuming that the first item generated into working memory guides overt attentional processes was most consistent with the data at both the aggregate and single-participant levels of analysis.

Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2014

Hypothesis generation is the process people use to generate explanations for patterns of data, wh... more Hypothesis generation is the process people use to generate explanations for patterns of data, which is an act vital to everyday problem solving. It is the basis for decision making in many professions, such as medicine, intelligence and reconnaissance analysis, auditing, and fault detection in nuclear power plants. Even laypeople’s impressions of acquaintances’ personalities based on behavioral patterns can be considered a case of hypothesis generation. This article provides an overview of research elucidating the cognitive processes that underlie hypothesis generation and decision making.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2012

Although temporal dynamics are inherent aspects of diagnostic tasks, few studies have investigate... more Although temporal dynamics are inherent aspects of diagnostic tasks, few studies have investigated how various aspects of time course influence hypothesis generation. An experiment is reported that demonstrates that working memory dynamics operating during serial data acquisition bias hypothesis generation. The presentation rate (and order) of a sequence of serially presented symptoms was manipulated to be either fast (180 ms per symptom) or slow (1,500 ms per symptom) in a simulated medical diagnosis task. When the presentation rate was slow, participants chose the disease hypothesis consistent with the symptoms appearing later in the sequence. When the presentation rate was fast, however, participants chose the disease hypothesis consistent with the symptoms appearing earlier in the sequence, therefore representing a novel primacy effect. We predicted and account for this effect through competitive working memory dynamics governing information acquisition and the contribution of maintained information to the retrieval of hypotheses from long-term memory.