Chen at Cognitive Brown Bag, Weds. 4/8 at noon

Tina Chen (PhD Candidate in PBS) will be presenting Not just noise: Individual differences in response bias in memory and reasoning in the Cognitive Brown Bag series in Tobin 521B at noon Wednesday, April 8. Everyone is welcome – the abstract is below.

Abstract: Response bias is a component of decision-making that can be defined as the general willingness to respond a certain way. For example, in recognition memory, one can have a response bias towards responding that a test item has been previously studied, or in reasoning, one can have a response bias towards responding that a conclusion is logically valid. However, not all individuals have the same response bias. Indeed, there is some evidence that response bias is a stable cognitive trait in memory that differs across individuals (Kantner & Lindsay, 2012, 2014). One predictor of this trait may be cognitive ability, since it appears to predict response bias in memory (Zhu et al., 2010) and in reasoning (e.g., Handley & Trippas, 2015). While memory and reasoning have similar decision-making components and may be very related (e..g, Heit & Hayes, 2011; Heit, Rotello, & Hayes, 2012), this experiment will be the first to demonstrate whether cognitive ability predicts response bias in both tasks. Preliminary findings will be presented.