Adele Diederich

Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg · Department of Psychology

The field of mathematical psychology began in the 1950s and includes both psychological theorizing, in which mathematics plays a key role, and applied mathematics motivated by substantive problems in psychology. Central to its success was the publication of the first Handbook of Mathematical Psychology in the 1960s. The psychological sciences have...

We report two studies investigating individual intuitive-deliberative cognitive-styles and risk-styles as moderators of the framing effect in Tversky and Kahneman's famous Unusual Disease problem setting. We examined framing effects in two ways: counting the number of frame-inconsistent choices and comparing the proportions of risky choices dependi...

The field of mathematical psychology began in the 1950s and includes both psychological theorizing, in which mathematics plays a key role, and applied mathematics motivated by substantive problems in psychology. Central to its success was the publication of the first Handbook of Mathematical Psychology in the 1960s. The psychological sciences have...

This is a chapter draft for volume 3 of the New Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, edited by F.G. Ashby, H. Colonius, and E.N. Dzhafarov (Cambridge UP, 2023)

The present study investigates the influence of framing, different amounts to lose, and probabilities of a risky and sure choice option, time limits, and need on risky decision-making. For a given block of trials, participants were equipped with a personal budget (number of points). On each trial within a block, a specific initial amount is possibl...

We investigate the impact of individual differences in risk-style and thinking-style on choice option characteristics in Tversky and Kahneman's famous Unusual Disease problem setting with a psychophysical data collection approach extending Mahoney et al. (2011). In addition to gain-loss frames, we varied the number of affected people, probabilities...

The issue of how perception and motor planning interact to generate a given choice between actions is a fundamental question in both psychology and neuroscience. Salinas and colleagues have developed a behavioral paradigm, the compelled-response task, where the signal that instructs the subject to make an eye movement is given before the cue that i...

This work is a continuation of Mallahi-Karai and Diederich (2019), where the authors introduced and studied the cube model as a multi-dimensional extension of the diffusion model in binary choice model. The aim of this note is to introduce and study the disk model, which can be viewed as a variation of the model introduced in the aforementioned pap...

Integrating information across our various sensory modalities results in striking behavioral benefits. This integration depends on a variety of factors, among which are the effectiveness of the stimuli and the relative timing between them. Both of these factors physically vary as a function of the distance between stimuli and the observer: intensit...

In two experiments, participants had to choose between a sure and a risky option. The sure option was presented either in a gain or a loss frame. Need was defined as a minimum score the participants had to reach. Moreover, choices were made under two different time constraints and with three different levels of induced need to be reached within a f...

To investigate how neediness and identifiability of a recipient influence the willingness of a donor to invest resources in charity-like lotteries we propose a new game, called ‘need game’. Similar to the dictator game, the need game includes two players, one active player (the donor or dictator) and one passive player (the recipient). Both players...

The issue of how perception and motor planning interact to generate a given choice between actions is a fundamental question in both psychology and neuroscience. Salinas and colleagues have developed a behavioral paradigm, the compelled-response task, where the signal that instructs the subject to make an eye movement is given before the cue that i...

This chapter discusses five topics related to the role and types of needs in justice-related judgments: (1) Need as a motive, particularly as conceptualized in theories that may contribute to the overarching goal of identifying needs relevant to justice judgments from the psychological perspective. (2) Need as one justice principle in the triad wit...

Preference reversals—a decision maker prefers A over B in one situation but B over A in another—demonstrate that human behavior violates invariance assumptions of (utility-based) rational choice theories. In the field of multi-alternative multi-attribute decision-making research, 3 preference reversals received special attention: similarity, attrac...

Dual process theories of decision making describe choice as the result of an automatic System 1, which is quick to activate but behaves impulsively, and a deliberative System 2, which is slower to activate but makes decisions in a rational and controlled manner. However, most existent dual process theories are verbal descriptions and do not generat...

We propose a family of new multi-episode models of decision making with more than two alternatives. These models can be viewed as multi-dimensional extensions of the standard diffusion model (i.e. Wiener process) with two alternatives introduced in Laming (1968), Link and Heath (1975), Ratcliff (1978) while at the same time, they incorporate Tversk...

Preference reversals-a decision maker prefers A over B in one situation but B over A in another-demonstrate that human behavior violates invariance assumptions of (utility-based) rational choice theories. In the field of multi-alternative multi-attribute decision-making research, 3 preference reversals received special attention: similarity, attrac...

The notion of copula has attracted attention from the field of contextuality and probability. A copula is a function that joins a multivariate distribution to its one-dimensional marginal distributions. Thereby, it allows characterizing the multivariate dependency separately from the specific choice of margins. Here, we demonstrate the use of copul...

A preferential choice paradigm with real consequences (money, loudness of an annoying sound, and waiting time) is proposed and tested in a “psychophysical” experiment with six subjects who made 960 pairwise choices each, 480 under risk and 480 under uncertainty.

Context effects are changes of choice probabilities due to changes of choice set composition. Three such effects, similarity, attraction, and compromise effects, have been originally observed after adding a third alternative to a two-option set. Explaining the three effects simultaneously has become a benchmark for computational cognitive process m...

Dual process theories of intertemporal decision making propose that decision makers automatically favor immediate rewards. In this paper, we use a drift diffusion model to implement these theories, and empirically investigate the role of their proposed automatic biases. Our model permits automatic biases in the response process, in the form of a sh...

Although it is well documented that occurrence of an irrelevant and nonpredictive sound facilitates motor responses to a subsequent target light appearing nearby, the cause of this "exogenous spatial cuing effect" has been under discussion. On the one hand, it has been postulated to be the result of a shift of visual spatial attention possibly trig...

We examined the impact of identifiability, framing, and time limits on altruism towards individuals in need. We designed an experiment that consisted of various lotteries with different winning/losing probabilities. Participant’s task was to use a portion of an initial endowment to place a bet on each lottery. If they won, the gain was added to the...

This study examined framing effects in decisions concerning public health. Tversky and Kahneman’s famous Asian Disease Problem served as experimental paradigm. Subjects chose between a sure and a risky option either presented as gains (saving lives) or as losses (dying). The amount of risk varied in terms of different probabilities. The number of a...

The ability to inhibit our responses voluntarily is an important case of cognitive control. The stop-signal paradigm is a popular tool to study response inhibition. Participants perform a response time task (go task), and occasionally, the go stimulus is followed by a stop signal after a variable delay, indicating subjects to withhold their respons...

Sensory signals originating from a single event, such as audiovisual speech, are temporally correlated. Correlated signals are known to facilitate multisensory integration and binding. We sought to further elucidate the nature of this relationship, hypothesizing that multisensory perception will vary with the strength of audiovisual correlation. Hu...

Women with managerial careers are significantly less satisfied with their life than their male counterparts. Why? In a representative German panel dataset (GSOEP) we find biological constraints and substitutive mechanisms determining the subjective well-being of female managers. Women’s terminated fertility has a negative impact on women’s life sat...

Many phenomena in judgment and decision making are often attributed to the interaction of 2 systems of reasoning. Although these so-called dual process theories can explain many types of behavior, they are rarely formalized as mathematical or computational models. Rather, dual process models are typically verbal theories, which are difficult to con...

The ability to inhibit our responses voluntarily is an important case of cognitive control. The stop-signal paradigm is a popular tool to study response inhibition. Participants perform a response time task ( go task ) and, occasionally, the go stimulus is followed by a stop signal after a variable delay, indicating subjects to withhold their respo...

Sensory signals originating from a single event, such as audiovisual speech, are temporally correlated. Correlated signals are known to facilitate multisensory integration and binding. We sought to further elucidate the nature of this relationship, hypothesizing that multisensory perception will vary with the strength of audiovisual correlation. Hu...

Multisensory integration (MI) is defined as the neural process by which unisensory signals are combined to form a new product that is significantly different from the responses evoked by the modality-specific component stimuli. In recent years, MI research has seen exponential growth in the number of empirical and theoretical studies. This paper pr...

When choosing between multiple alternatives, people usually do not have ready-made preferences in their mind but rather construct them on the go. The 2N-ary Choice Tree Model (Wollschlaeger & Diederich, 2012) proposes a preference construction process for N choice options from description, which is based on attribute weights, differences between at...

The race model inequality has become an important testing tool for the analysis of redundant signals tasks. In crossmodal reaction time experiments, the strength of violation of the inequality is taken as measure of multisensory integration occurring beyond probability summation. Here we extend previous results on trimodal race model inequalities a...

A neuron is categorized as ``multisensory'' if there is a statistically significant difference between the response evoked, e.g., by a crossmodal stimulus combination and that evoked by the most effective of its components separately. Being responsive to multiple sensory modalities does not guarantee that a neuron has actually engaged in integratin...

Every day, people face snap decisions when time is a limiting factor. In addition, the way a problem is presented can influence people’s choices, which creates what are known as framing effects. In this research, we explored how time pressure interacts with framing effects in risky decision making. Specifically, does time pressure strengthen or wea...

Most of the parties involved in healthcare decisions – governments, politicians, healthcare professionals, pharmaceutical companies, special interest groups – actively work to make their desires known. In Israel the public is part of the decision committee; in Germany health care decision are made more or less without the public being involved. In...

Saccadic reaction times from a focused-attention task with a visual target and an acoustic nontarget support the hypothesis that the amount of saccadic facilitation in the presence of a nontarget increases with the prior knowledge of alignment with the target across different blocks of trials. The time-window-of-integration model can account for th...

The multi-stage decision model, aka multiattribute attention switching model, assumes a separate sampling process for each attribute and switching attention from one attribute to the next in a sequential fashion during one trial. Here the model is extended to finite and infinite time horizons and to non-constant boundaries. For a finite time horizo...

Health systems worldwide are struggling with the need to control costs to maintain system viability. With the combination of new expensive health technologies, an aging population and changing epidemiology on one hand, and worsening economic conditions and reductions in tax revenues on the other hand, the pressure to make structural changes is expe...

Sequential decision making describes a situation where the decision maker makes successive observations of a process before a final decision is made. The procedure to decide when to stop taking observations and when to continue, the optimal stopping rule, depends on the specific assumptions made about the situation: the knowledge about the distribu...

Payoffs may affect choice frequencies in perceptual decision tasks. Several studies investigating this effect have shown that sequential sampling models account for choice probability and choice response times when applying different payoffs. Typically payoffs are presented \textit{before} the perceptual stimuli. In addition to this, here two more...

In decisions from experience (DFE), people sample from two or more lotteries prior to making a consequential choice. Although existing models can account for how sampled experiences relate to choice, they don't explain decisions about how to search (in particular, when to stop sampling information). We propose that both choice and search behavior i...

A single neuron is categorized as “multisensory” if there is a statistically significant difference between the response evoked by a cross-modal stimulus combination and that evoked by the most effective of its components individually. The most widely applied quantitative index expresses multisensory enhancement (or inhibition) as a proportion of t...

A neuron from the deep layers of the superior colliculus, is categorized as "multisensory" if it responds to both unisensory and multisensory stimulation. However, being responsive to multiple sensory modalities does not guarantee that a neuron has actually engaged in integrating its multiple sensory inputs rather than simply responding to the most...

Background Prevention is a health care area which is clearly prioritized by the population compared to other health care areas such as curing a disease . Little is known about people’s preferences of how prioritization of preventive services criteria should be carried out. Objectives The study investigates the public’s opinion regarding the importa...

Aim We investigated public opinion on therapeutic benefit, costs, and evidence-based medicine (EBM) as possible prioritization criteria and probed for associations between respondents’ preferences and their personal health and their disease experience. Subjects and methods In computer-assisted personal interviews with a representative sample of the...

Even though visual and auditory information of 1 and the same event often do not arrive at the sensory receptors at the same time, due to different physical transmission times of the modalities, the brain maintains a unitary perception of the event, at least within a certain range of sensory arrival time differences. The properties of this "tempora...

This chapter provides a brief overview of all the steps of computational modeling and illustrates their use in cognitive and decision neuroscience. The chapter starts with a simple example model developed for a popular "decision from experience" type of task. Second, the chapter discusses the important issue concerning analysis of group versus indi...

The phase reset hypothesis states that the phase of an ongoing neural oscillation, reflecting periodic fluctuations in neural activity between states of high and low excitability, can be shifted by the occurrence of a sensory stimulus so that the phase value become highly constant across trials (Schroeder et al., 2008). From EEG/MEG studies it has...

Aim Personal responsibility for one’s health is frequently discussed when deciding on health-care allocation and corresponding costs. We address two questions: (1) Which health-related behavior qualifies for private contributions to treatment costs in the view of the German public? (2) Do acceptance rates for copayments depend on specific characte...

A sequential sampling model for multiattribute binary choice options, called multiattribute attention switching (MAAS) model, assumes a separate sampling process for each attribute. During the deliberation process attention switches from one attribute consideration to the next. The order in which attributes are considered as well for how long each...

In multisensory settings such as the focused attention paradigm (FAP), subjects are instructed to respond to stimuli of the target modality only, yet reaction times tend to be shorter if an unattended stimulus is presented within a certain spatiotemporal vicinity of the target. The time window of integration (TWIN) model predicts successfully these...

Modern driver assistance systems make increasing use of auditory and tactile signals in order to reduce the driver's visual information load. This entails potential crossmodal interaction effects that need to be taken into account in designing an optimal system. Here we show that saccadic reaction times to visual targets (cockpit or outside mirror)...

Information about on-going events in the environment typically arrives in parallel via different sensory channels. In order to achieve a coherent and valid perception of the outside world, the brain must determine which of these temporally coincident sensory signals are caused by the same physical source and thus should be integrated into a single...

Aim We investigate opinions regarding which preventative services should be given priority funding; the importance of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention; and bivariate associations between the respondents’ sociodemographics, health status and lifestyle and their preferences. Subjects and methods Computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI)...

Research on cultural intelligence and conflict management styles. Experiments on moderating effects of national and global identity salience.

We define the 2N-ary choice tree model for reaction times and choice probabilities in N-alternative preferential choice by specifying a random walk on a 2N-ary tree. It allows for calculation of expected choice response times and expected choice probabilities in closed form and accounts for several preference reversal effects that emerge from the c...

Background: During the 2009 outbreak of novel influenza AH1N1, insufficient data were available to adequately inform decision makers about benefits and risks of vaccination and disease. We hypothesized that individuals would opt to mimic their peers, having no better decision anchor. We used Game Theory, decision analysis, and transmission models...

In the time-window-of-integration (TWIN) model framework multisensory integration occurs only if the peripheral processes elicited in different sensory channels terminate within temporal proximity of each other (Colonius and Diederich, 2004). The model has been successful in predicting mean reaction times (RTs) to crossmodal stimuli under a host of...

Fair rationing in publicly accessible health care has become a subject of current international debate. One suggestion is to cut reimbursement for any medical intervention below some threshold of small clinical benefit. One can further differentiate between thresholds of small expectable clinical benefit as such and thresholds of low chances for cl...

In all industrial countries publicly funded health care systems are confronted with budget constraints. Therefore, priority setting in resource allocation seems inevitable. This paper examines whether personal characteristics could be taken into consideration when allocating health services in Germany, and whether attitudes towards prioritizing hea...

Initiating an eye movement towards a suddenly appearing visual target is faster when an accessory auditory stimulus occurs in close spatiotemporal vicinity. Such facilitation of saccadic reaction time (SRT) is well-documented, but the exact neural mechanisms underlying the crossmodal effect remain to be elucidated. From EEG/MEG studies it has been...

Procedure for determining lower frequencies. The observed mean SRT with its trend function, a polynomial of degree 6 (left upper panel); the trend (black) of the trend function (red), a polynomial of degree 2 (upper right); the different between both trend functions, zero-mean difference function (lower left); power spectrum of the zero-mean differ...

The original spectrum plotted against confidence interval bounds () for amplitude distribution across frequencies (Participants 5–6). Means are computed across samples from the set of shuffled time series, standard errors are calculated from original time series (). (TIF)

Power spectra for Participants 1–6 (lower frequencies). (TIF)

Spectrograms for participants P1, P2, and P3. Left panels: Ipsilateral presentation. Right panels: contralateral presentation. (TIF)

Spectrograms for participants P4, P5, and P6. Left panels: Ipsilateral presentation. Right panels: contralateral presentation. (TIF)

The original spectrum plotted against confidence interval bounds () for amplitude distribution across frequencies (Participants 2–4). Means are computed across n = 1; 000 samples from the set of shuffled time series, standard errors are calculated from original time series (). (TIF)

Percentage of errors by type for each participant. (PDF)

Probing for slower oscillatory activity. (PDF)

Judgment and decision making is an interdisciplinary field with many facets. Psychological approaches primarily focus on describing and understanding human behavior in (experimental) decision-making situations. Various methods to elicit judgments are described. Numerical probability estimates are evaluated according to rules derived from probabilit...

In the crossmodal signals paradigm (CSP) participants are instructed to respond to a set of stimuli from different modalities, presented more or less simultaneously, as soon as a stimulus from any modality has been detected. In the focused attention paradigm (FAP), on the other hand, responses should only be made to a stimulus from a pre-defined ta...