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This thesis is concerned with the problem of how people learn to use uncer­tain information for making judgments. The general framework for the thesis is Social Judgment Theory (SJT). First the S3T paradigm, and some research conducted within the paradigm, is briefly described, and a series of four empirical studies is summarized. The studies are concerned with two factors that have been found to have great effect on subjects achievement in cue probability learning (CPL) tasks: task predictability, and the form of the function relating cue and criterion. The effects of these two factors were studied in experiments employing cue-probability learning tasks. The studies concerned with task predictability addressed the following questions (a) Do subjects understand the probabilistic nature of CPL-tasks? (b) Are subjects able to detect that a random task is, in fact, random, a study undertaken to test an aspect of Seligmans "theory of helplessness". This was also an attempt to bring emotional factors more in foeus.(c) Do subjects use data from the task only to test hypotheses, or do they use data also to construct hypotheses? The results showed that (a) subjects do not seem to be able to cope with probabilistic tasks in an optimal statistical manner. Instead they seem to use a deterministic approach to the tasks, because they do not understand the probabilistic nature of the task, (b) Task predictability affecs subjects mood, but not in the way predicted by Seligman, (c) Subjects seem to use data frorn the task only to test their hypotheses. The results thus supported the hypo­theses sampling model for the learning of CPL-tasks. As for the factor of function form, the following questions were addressed, (a) What hypotheses about relations between variables do subjects have? (b) Is the difficulties subjects have in learning complex rules in CPL-tasks due to a low availability of hypotheses about complex rules? The results showed that, (a) the hypothesis hierarchy as revealed in the present experiments was in general agreement with earlier results. However, few nonlinear hypotheses were observed, and other rules than functional rules were observed, (b) The difficulties subjects have to learn complex rules in CPL-tasks do not seem to be caused by low availability of rules. Finally, some suggestions are given for how the SJT-paradigm should be deve­loped. Specifically, it is suggested that the effects of emotional factors should be given more attention, and that the paradigm should be turned into a more general hypothesis testing model / <p></p><p>　</p><p></p> / digitalisering@umu

Krumhansl (1990) has proposed that our sense of tonality is based, in part, on the perception and internal representation of the hierarchies of pitch class salience in music. It has further been proposed that regularities in pitch patterns may be acquired through statistical learning. To further explore this proposal, we conducted two experiments in which musically untrained participants were exposed to tone sequences generated from one of two pitch profiles: Lydian or Hypophrygian. Tone sequences were randomly generated from event frequency profiles computed by Huron and Veltman (2006), with frequencies converted to probability of occurrence. Exposure trials consisted of 100 sequences generated from one mode for half the participants and from the other mode for the remaining participants. Sequences generated from the unexposed mode appeared in test trials only. Following the exposure trials, testing involved pairing exposed and unexposed tone sequences at each of three levels of distinctiveness. Versions of the tone sequences were constructed to be more or less distinctive following an algorithm described by Smith & Schmuckler (2004). In Experiment 1, participants were asked to record which pair member they preferred and in Experiment 2, participants were asked to record which pair member was more familiar. In both experiments, both groups received the same test pairs. Results of Experiment 1 indicated no preference for any tone sequence type. However, results of Experiment 2 revealed participants had acquired knowledge of the exposed pitch distribution, and were able to generalize to the more distinctive level. The findings support those of Loui, Wessel, and Hudson Kam (2010) in terms of a dissociation between recognition and preference. We suggest this may be due to methodology, stimulus-type and participant strategy. The findings also support Krumhansl (1990), as salient pitches appear to be important in the recognition of pitch probability profiles. / Thesis (Master, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-13 16:26:46.099

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Embodied cognitive science has argued that cognition is embodied principally in virtue of gross morphological and sensorimotor features. This thesis argues that cognition is also internally embodied in affective and fine-grained physiological features whose transformative roles remain mostly unnoticed in contemporary cognitive science. I call this ‘proper embodiment’. I approach this larger subject by examining various emotion theories in philosophy and psychology. These tend to emphasise one of the many gross components of emotional processes, such as ‘feeling’ or ‘judgement’ to the detriment of the others, often leading to an artificial emotion-cognition distinction even within emotion science itself. Attempts to reconcile this by putting the gross components back together, such as Jesse Prinz’s “embodied appraisal theory”, are, I argue, destined to failure because the vernacular concept of emotion which is used as the explanandum is not a natural kind and is not amenable to scientific explication. I examine Antonio Damasio’s proposal that emotion is involved in paradigmatic ‘cognitive’ processing such as rational decision making, and argue (1) that the research he discusses does not warrant the particular hypothesis he favours, and (2) that Damasio’s account, though in many ways a step in the right direction, nonetheless continues to endorse a framework which sees affect and cognition as separate (though now highly interacting) faculties. I further argue that the conflation of ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ may be the source of some confusion in emotion theory and that affect needs to be properly distinguished from ‘emotion’. I examine some dissociations in the pain literature which give us further empirical evidence that, as with the emotions, affect is a distinct component along with more cognitive elements of pain. I then argue that affect is distinctive in being grounded in homeostatic regulative activity in the body proper. With the distinction between affect, emotion, and cognition in hand, and the associated grounding of affect in bodily activity, I then survey evidence that bodily affect is also involved in perception and in paradigmatic cognitive processes such as attention and executive function. I argue that this relation is not ‘merely’ casual. Instead, affect (grounded in fine-grained details of internal bodily activity) is partially constitutive of cognition, participating in cognitive processing and contributing to perceptual and cognitive phenomenology. Finally I review some work in evolutionary robotics which reaches a similar conclusion, suggesting that the particular fine details of embodiment, such as molecular signalling between both neural and somatic cells matters to cognition. I conclude that cognition is ‘properly embodied’ in that it is partially constituted by the many fine-grained bodily processes involved in affect (as demonstrated in the thesis) and plausibly by a wide variety of other fine-grained bodily processes that likewise tend to escape the net of contemporary cognitive science.

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