Search

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.

In reasoning about everyday problems, people use statistical heuristics, that is, judgmental tools that are rough intuitive equivalents of statistical principles. Statistical heuristics have improved historically and they improve ontogenetically. Use of statistical heuristics is more likely when (a) the sample space and the sampling process are clear, (b) the role of chance in producing events is clear, or (c) the culture specifies statistical reasoning as normative for the events. Perhaps because statistical procedures are part of people's intuitive equipment to begin with, training in statistics has a marked impact on reasoning. Training increases both the likelihood that people will take a statistical approach to a given problem and the quality of the statistical solutions. These empirical findings have important normative implications.

We present a theory of classical conditioning based on a parallel, rule-based performance system integrated with mechanisms for inductive learning. Inferential heuristics are used to add new rules to the system in response to the relation between the system's predictions and environmental input. A major heuristic is based on "unusuamess": Novel cues are favored as candidates to predict events that are important or unexpected. Rules have strength values that are revised on the basis of feedback. The performance system allows rules to operate in parallel, competing to control behavior and obtain reward for successful prediction of important events. Sets of rules can form default hierarchies: Exception rules censor useful but imperfect default rules, protecting them from loss of strength. The theory is implemented as a computer simulation, which is used to model a broad range of conditioning phenomena, including blocking and overshadowing, the impact of statistical predictability on conditioning, and conditioned inhibition. The theory accounts for a variety of phenomena that previous theories have not dealt with successfully.

Evidence is reviewed which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Subjects are sometimes (a) unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response, and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes.