Arthur B Markman

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Psychology

"Management, Operating Structure, Efficiencies, and Opportunities and Challenges of Transferring the Driver License Program", Texas: In 2019, the 86th Texas State Legislature passed Senate Bill (S.B.) 616 and a similar provision in the General Appropriations Act requiring a study to evaluate the Driver’s License Program operated by the Department o...

Cognitive psychology identifies different assumptions about the mental representations that form the basis of theories of comparison. Each representation requires a different process to generate a comparison, and both the computational complexity and the output of the different processes differ. Spatial models require a low-complexity process but o...

Much creative work takes place in groups or teams, but also individual creative efforts cannot be seen as separate from a social context. In recent decades, the questions “What makes groups and teams creative?” and “How is creativity shaped by the social context?” have therefore received increasing research attention. This book provides a comprehen...

Texas has experienced levels of seismicity comparable to areas of California in recent years, and seismologists suggest that the increased activity in Texas is likely the result of human activities associated with oil and gas extraction. However, the general public is largely unaware of induced seismicity and related risks. To better understand thi...

Innovation—the process of generating and implementing practical new ideas—can be difficult for organizations to do successfully. To make innovation a part of an organization, it is often necessary to change the culture in ways that bring more innovative processes into the workplace. In this chapter, I explore key factors that have to be part of a c...

Cyber aggression is a pervasive problem, yet evolutionary psychologists have been slow to address this area of research. We utilize an evolutionary perspective to provide a theoretical framework to address research that has found that women are more vulnerable to negative effects of cyber aggression. Studies of intrasexual competition suggest that...

This study explores predictors of risk information avoidance intentions in the context of a novel environmental threat—induced earthquakes in Texas. Given the paucity of research on risk information avoidance, this work was guided by a cognitive information behavior model. Survey data (N = 541) from a random sample of Texas adults allowed us to exp...

Naturalistic decision-making research contrasts with traditional laboratory research along a number of dimensions. It is typically more observational, more focused on expert performance, and more attentive to the context in which decisions are made than laboratory studies. This approach helps to shore up some of the weaknesses of laboratory researc...

When making inferences about similar others, people anchor and adjust away from themselves (Tamir & Mitchell, 2013). However, research on relational self theory (Andersen & Chen, 2002) suggests the possibility of using knowledge about others as an anchor when they are more similar to a target. We investigated whether social inferences are made on t...

Two anomalies continue to confound researchers and science teacher educators. First, new science teachers are quick to discard the pedagogy and practices that they learn in their teacher education programs in favor of a traditional, didactic approach to teaching science. Second, a discrepancy exists at all stages of science teachers' careers betwee...

Much research has shown that a science teacher’s beliefs are related to their teaching practice. This line of research has often defined “belief” epistemologically. That is, beliefs are often defined relative to other mental constructs, such as knowledge, dispositions, or attitudes. Left unspecified is the role beliefs play in cognition and how the...

Research on causal reasoning has focused on the influence of covariation between candidate causes and effects on causal judgments. We suggest that the type of covariation information to which people attend is affected by the task being performed. For this, we manipulated the test questions for the evaluation of contingency information and observed...

Markman and Stilwell (2001) argued that many natural categories name roles in relational systems, and so they are role-governed categories. This view predicts instantiating a novel relational structure licenses the creation of novel role-governed categories. This paper supports this claim and helps to specify the mechanisms underlying this licensin...

Research has connected stereotype threat and regulatory fit by showing improved performance for individuals with negative stereotypes when they focused on minimizing potential losses. In the current study, non-Black participants, who were nonexperts at golf putting, were told that a golf putting task was diagnostic of natural athletic ability (i.e....

Research on science teacher cognition is important as findings from this research can be used to improve teacher training, leading to improved classroom practice. Previous research has often relied on two underlying assumptions: Cognition is an individual process, and these processes are detailed and introspective. In this paper, we put forth a com...

Physiological arousal, a marker of emotional response, has been demonstrated to accompany human decision making under uncertainty. Anticipatory emotions have been portrayed as basic and rapid evaluations of chosen actions. Instead, could these arousal signals stem from a "cognitive" assessment of value that utilizes the full environment structure,...

Cultural mindset is related to performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. In particular, studies of both chronic and situationally-primed mindsets show that individuals with a relatively interdependent mindset (i.e., an emphasis on relationships and connections among individuals) are more sensitive to background contextual information than indivi...

Abstraction is a useful process for broadening mental horizons, integrating new experiences, and communicating information to others. Much attention has been directed at identifying the causes and consequences of abstraction across the subdisciplines of psychology. Despite this attention, an integrative review of the methods that are used for study...

Markman finds that companies can nurture innovation by better understanding and employing cognitive science. Leaders should maximize the quality of knowledge, stop multitasking, find the essence of problems, nurture expert generalists, and distinguish between group problem solving and brainstorming. He relates how unorthodox thinking led to the dev...

A number of accounts of human and animal behavior posit the operation of parallel and competing valuation systems in the control of choice behavior. In these accounts, a flexible but computationally expensive model-based reinforcement-learning system has been contrasted with a less flexible but more efficient model-free reinforcement-learning syste...

We examined how feedback delay and stimulus offset timing affected declarative, rule-based and procedural, information-integration category-learning. We predicted that small feedback delays of several hundred milliseconds would lead to the best information-integration learning based on a highly regarded neurobiological model of learning in the stri...

Recent computational theories of decision making in humans and animals have portrayed 2 systems locked in a battle for control of behavior. One system-variously termed model-free or habitual-favors actions that have previously led to reward, whereas a second-called the model-based or goal-directed system-favors actions that causally lead to reward...

The authors first define the notion of cognitive dynamics and illustrate it with some examples. Then, the authors discuss theoretical approaches to psychology advocating abandoning computation and representation. Finally, the authors provide key definitions for computation, virtual machine, representation, and related notions, and the authors fu...

Embodied cognition pertains to the consequences on thought and emotion of living with our particular human sensory and motor systems. The consequences are quite varied, and researchers across the cognitive sciences have made great discoveries in line with this principle. However, while we offer this principle, it is necessarily broad, and searching...

Previous research suggests that members of East Asian cultures show a greater preference for dialectical thinking than do Westerners. This paper attempts to account for these differences in cognition using individual difference variables that may explain variation in performance both within and across cultures. Especially, we propose that the above...

Psychology researchers often avoid running participants from subject pools at the end of the semester because they are "unmotivated". We suggest that the end of the semester induces a situational prevention focus (i.e., sensitive to losses) unlike the beginning of the semester, which may induce a situational promotion focus (i.e., sensitive to gain...

This paper presents a novel approach, referred to as the WordTree design-by-analogy method, for identifying distant-domain analogies as part of the ideation process. The WordTree method derives its effectiveness through a design team's knowledge and readily available information sources (e. g., patent databases, Google) and does not require special...

Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have emerged over the past century as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the s...

Impulsivity is a stable personality trait associated with myopic choice behavior that favors immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards and is often characterized as maladaptive inside and outside of the laboratory. An alternative view suggests that the consequences of trait impulsivity depend on the nature of the task environment. On this view...

The authors employ behavioral theories of human motivation and affect and present an explanation for why some CSCW experience is satisfying and engaging for a user. In a longitudinal experiment, participants were divided into four groups and solved two open-ended problems together using a video-conference system. Traditional metrics of usability an...

The representational distortion (RD) approach to similarity (e.g., Hahn, Chater, & Richardson, 2003) proposes that similarity is computed using the transformation distance between two entities. We argue that researchers who adopt this approach need to be concerned with how representational transformations can be determined a priori. We discuss seve...

Similarity is a compelling part of everyday experience. In the visual world, objects that are similar in shape or color may seem to leap to our attention. In conceptual processing, we have an immediate sense of whether a pair of concepts is similar. Objects are assumed to be classified on the basis of their similarity to some stored category repres...

Cognitive models focus on information and the computational manipulation of information. Rational models optimize the function that relates the input of a process to the output. In contrast, efficient algorithms minimize the computational cost of processing in terms of time. Minimizing time is a better criterion for normative models, because it ref...

In order to develop sophisticated models of the core domains of knowledge that support complex cognitive processing in infants and children, developmental psychologists have mapped out the content of these knowledge domains. This research strategy may provide a blueprint for advancing research on adult cognitive processing. I illustrate this sugges...

Sleep deprivation has a complex set of neurological effects that go beyond a mere slowing of mental processes. While cognitive and perceptual impairments in sleep deprived individuals are widespread, some abilities remain intact. In an effort to characterize these effects, some have suggested an impairment of complex decision making ability despite...

Is the self-regulation failure that comes from prior exertions of self-regulation—the ego-depletion effect—the result of fatigue? A reading of the literature suggests that self-regulatory resource depletion and fatigue might be overlapping constructs, but direct empirical evidence is lacking. The authors put this question to the test by subjecting...

Advances in innovation processes are critically important as economic and business landscapes evolve. There are many concept generation techniques that can assist a de-signer in the initial phases of design. Unfortunately, few studies have examined these techniques that can provide evidence to suggest which techniques should be preferred or how to...

Probability matching is a suboptimal behavior that often plagues human decision-making in simple repeated choice tasks. Despite decades of research, recent studies cannot find agreement on what choice strategies lead to probability matching. We propose a solution, showing that two distinct local choice strategies-which make different demands on exe...

Many categories group together entities that play a common role across situations. For example, guest and host refer to complementary roles in visiting situations and, thus, are role-governed categories (A. B. Markman & Stilwell, Journal of Experiment & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 13, 329-358, 2001). However, categorizing an entity by role...

Cognitive psychologists have begun to address how motivational factors influence adults' performance on cognitive tasks. However, little research has examined how different motivational factors interact with one another to affect behavior across the lifespan. The current study examined how children perform on a classification task when placed in a...

Most theories of categorization posit feature-based representations. Markman and Stilwell (2001) argued that many natural categories name roles in relational systems and therefore they are role-governed categories. There is little extant empirical evidence to support the existence of role-governed categories. Three experiments examine predictions f...

This article examines the effects of a fit between a person's global regulatory focus and the local task reward structure on perceptual processing and judgment. On each trial, participants were presented with one of two briefly presented stimuli and were asked to identify it. Participants were placed in a promotion focus (a situationally induced se...

Research has shown that people's ability to transfer abstract relational knowledge across situations can be heavily influenced by the concrete objects that fill relational roles. This article provides evidence that the concreteness of the relations themselves also affects performance. In 3 experiments, participants viewed simple relational patterns...

Probability-matching is a well-documented suboptimal behav-ior that arises in simple prediction tasks. We identify two dis-tinct, local choice strategies that both give rise to probability-matching behavior on a global level. Using a dual-task paradigm, we evaluate the hypothesis that these qualitatively different strategies exhibit different deman...

Machery argues that concepts are too heterogeneous to be a natural kind. I argue that the book does not go far enough. Theories of concepts assume that the task of categorizing warrants a unique set of cognitive constructs. Instead, cognitive science must look across tasks to find a fundamental set of cognitive mechanisms.

This work explores the influence of motivation on choice behavior in a dynamic decision-making environment, where the payoffs from each choice depend on one's recent choice history. Previous research reveals that participants in a regulatory fit exhibit increased levels of exploratory choice and flexible use of multiple strategies over the course o...

Psychological research has demonstrated important parallels between the structural alignment process involved in judgments of similarity and the processes that are involved in analogical reasoning. Gradually, this work on comparisons was applied to consumer choice. In this paper, we review the influence of structural alignment on choices among a se...

Research on category-based induction has documented a consistent typicality effect: Typical exemplars promote stronger inferences about their broader category than atypical exemplars. This work has been largely confined to categories whose central tendencies are also the most typical members of the category. Does the typicality effect apply to the...

People use information about the covariation between a putative cause and an outcome to determine whether a causal relationship obtains. When there are two candidate causes and one is more strongly related to the effect than is the other, the influence of the second is underestimated. This phenomenon is called causal discounting. In two experiments...

In this article we discuss how incentive motivations and task demands affect performance. We present a three-factor framework that suggests that performance is determined from the interaction of global incentives, local incentives, and the psychological processes needed to achieve optimal task performance. We review work that examines the implicati...

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST; Heaton, 1980) is commonly used to assess concept formation and set shifting. Cognitive research suggests that set shifting performance is enhanced by a match between a person's regulatory focus (promotion focus: attempting to earn an entry into a cash drawing; prevention focus: attempting to avoid losing an en...

The theoretical framework that motivates our research program predicts a three-way interaction between global incentives, local rewards, and task structure, such that the optimal combination of incentives and rewards depends on the factors that govern optimal task performance. When optimal task performance requires cognitive flexibility, a "match"...

This chapter focuses on the role of the reuse of knowledge to support idea generation. Expert designers often solve problems by taking known solutions and adapting them to a new situation. In many cases, truly novel solutions emerge from reusing solutions from one domain in a second domain in which they had not been applied before. This type of kno...

In order to streamline design processes, it is crucial to understand where new ideas come from. This chapter starts by outlining the ways that designers can generate novel solutions to problems. The many chapters in this volume explore a variety of different paths to innovation. To put these chapters into perspective, this chapter starts with a bro...

Research on dynamic decision-making tasks, in which the payoffs associated with each choice vary with participants' recent choice history, shows that humans have difficulty making long-term optimal choices in the presence of attractive immediate rewards. However, a number of recent studies have shown that simple cues providing information about the...

Cognitive Science research is hard to conduct, because researchers must take phenomena from the world and turn them into laboratory tasks for which a reasonable level of experimental control can be achieved. Consequently, research necessarily makes tradeoffs between internal validity (experimental control) and external validity (the degree to which...

Understanding innovation processes is an inherently multidisciplinary research task. Innovations occur within particular domains such as engineering. Innovation processes must respect the boundaries of human cognitive abilities. Practical innovations must take into account consumer needs and factors that affect consumer acceptance of those ideas. T...

The Science Behind the Practical Methods That Drive New Ideas... This book came about as the result of a workshop called Tools for Innovation held at the University of Texas. We had been talking about finding a way to get psychologists, engineers, computer scientists, and consumer behavior researchers together to talk about innovation. John Sibley...

We extend previous work examining the effects of pressure on category learning to the effects of pressure on categorization performance in highly trained individuals. After extensive training on either a rule-based or an information-integration classification task, half of the participants performed the same task on a fifth day while under pressure...

Previous research (Markman, Maddox, & Worthy, 2006) suggests that pressure leads to choking when one is learning to classify items on the basis of an explicit rule, but it leads to excelling when one is learning to classify items on the basis of an implicit strategy. In this article, we relate social pressure to regulatory focus theory. We propose...

This research documents performance decrements resulting from the activation of a negative task-relevant stereotype. The authors combine a number of strands of work to identify causes of stereotype threat in a way that allows them to reverse the effects and improve the performance of individuals with negative task-relevant stereotypes. The authors...

Sleep deprivation effects in a fluid, real-time competitive environment are examined using a resource acquisition foraging task. The task is ideal for examining the exploration–exploitation tradeoff in decision making. The exploration–exploitation tradeoff is the balancing of previously successful strategies with the adoption of new strategies. The...

This section of the volume summarizes responses to these questions, which include: 1. What is the relevance of psychological studies of culture to national development and national policies? (Harry C. Triandis, Shalom H. Schwartz, Richard W. Brislin, Sik Hung Ng) 2. What is the relationship between macro structures of a society and shared cognition...

Several models of choice compute the probability of selecting a given option by comparing the expected value (EV) of each option. However, a subtle but important difference between two common rules used to compute the action probability is often ignored. Specifically, one common rule type, the exponential rule, compares EVs via a difference operati...

Much of the literature studying on-line sentence comprehension focuses on the contributions of individual lexical items, with specific interest in verbs. One aspect of sentence meaning that has been claimed to be rooted in verb representation is event structure. There is a growing body of evidence supporting the claim that the verb is not the sole...

(from the chapter) This chapter examines the influence of goals on the evaluation of goal-related items, goal-conflicting items, and goal-unrelated items. It begins by examining two factors influencing preferences: the mental representation of goals and self-regulation. It then examines how goals affect the accessibility of items as a function of g...

Facility damage assessments are performed in the hours and days following a disaster event, and the individuals who conduct these assessments are often volunteers from the impacted community. Consequently, these volunteers typically have limited knowledge of facilities, which may cause biased and inaccurate damage judgments. To overcome these impor...

Dynamical system can help cognitive science for evaluating the moment-by-moment evolution of cognitive processing using eye tracking. Dynamical systems can explaining many low-level perceptual and motor phenomena for cognitive science. Embodied cognition and perceptual symbol system can explain the influence of bodily state on cognitive processes....

It is important to take a developmental approach to the problem of analogy. One limitation of this approach, however, is that it does not deal with the complexity of making analogical inferences. There are a few key principles of analogical inference that are not well captured by the analogical relational priming (ARP) model.

Motivation affects the degree to which people engage in tasks as well as the processes that they bring to bear. We explore the proposal that a fit between a person's situationally-induced self-regulatory focus and the reward structure of the task that they are pursuing supports greater flexibility in processing than does a mismatch between regulato...

Analogies to nature and other designs are recognized for its power in seeking innovative solutions. Currently available design methods provide little guidance for systematically identifying potential analogous solutions for a design problem. The typical guidance is that analogies are useful for seeking solutions and to look for analogies to other p...

Relational representation abilities are a crucial cognitive difference between human and nonhuman animals. We argue that relational reasoning and representation supports the development of culture that increases in complexity. Thus, these abilities are a force that magnifies the apparent difference in cognitive abilities between humans and nonhuman...

Design by analogy is a powerful part of the design process across the wide variety of modalities used by designers such as linguistic descriptions, sketches, and diagrams. We need tools to support people's ability to find and use analogies. A deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying design and analogy is a crucial step in develop...