Bruce Burns

The University of Sydney · School of Psychology

Decision-making heuristics rely on proxies so the elements of heuristics appear to map well to the elements of proxies identified by John et al. However, unlike proxy failure, heuristics do not fail because of feedback. This may be because for successful heuristics the goals of regulators and agents are aligned, but this is not the case for proxy f...

Introduction The present systematic review investigates the psychological tools available for capturing high-stakes decisions involving life-death content and their psychometric properties. Valid measurement of these individual differences will provide crucial information in the personnel selection and training in fields where high-stakes moral iss...

Previous research found that anecdotes are more persuasive than statistical data—the anecdotal bias effect. Separate research found that anecdotes that are similar to a target problem are more influential on decision-making than dissimilar anecdotes. Further, previous investigations on anecdotal bias primarily focused on medical decision-making wit...

Previous experiments have shown that a comparison of two written narratives highlights theirshared relational structure, which in turn facilitates the retrieval of analogous narratives from the past (e.g., Gentner, Loewenstein, Thompson, & Forbus, 2009). However, analogical retrieval occurs across domains that appear more conceptually distant than...

Aggregating the risk of a series of decisions reduces the overall risk compared to when each decision is considered individually—the logic behind diversified investment strategies. Most experimental research on a series of risky decisions provides participants with immediate feedback for each individual choice before presenting the subsequent gambl...

Business executives often have to allocate resources across very dissimilar projects. They use financial measures, such as Net Present Value (NPV) that simplify this difficult comparison because they aim to be equally applicable to any kind of project, but these measures vary in their reliability. Psychological research suggests that comparing alig...

Background: Feelings of fat are common for people with eating disorders, but ways of measuring its intensity are needed. Therefore, our goal was to develop a self-report feelings of fat scale that asked participants to indicate how intensely they currently felt statements such as "I feel fat". With such a scale we can determine how strongly feelin...

This research examined different conceptualisations and measurements of adaptability in a university context. We compared two approaches to adaptability: (1) personal attribute and (2) performance construct. In the extant literature, the former is dominated by self-report measures, whereas the latter is dominated by performance-based tasks. In two...

Background We examined whether cognitive rigidity associated with having an eating disorder generalized to creativity. Method One hundred twelve participants from the participant pool of an Australian university were given a measure of disordered eating (EDE-Q), asked if they had ever had a diagnosis of an eating disorder (16 reported yes), and gi...

The present study provides evidence for far analogical retrieval, i.e., analogical retrieval across disparate task domains, as a result of analogical comparison. Participants read source stories, which were then retrieved after a filled delay through abstract letter-string cues that matched the relational form of key parts of stories. They then gen...

The three-space theory of problem solving predicts that the quality of a learner's model and the goal specificity of a task interact on knowledge acquisition. In Experiment 1 participants used a computer simulation of a lever system to learn about torques. They either had to test hypotheses (nonspecific goal), or to produce given values for variabl...

Based on theories of scientific discovery learning (SDL) and conceptual change, this study explores students' preconceptions in the domain of torques in physics and the development of these conceptions while learning with a computer-based SDL task. As a framework we used a three-space theory of SDL and focused on model space, which is supposed to c...

This paper provides a theoretical overview and empirical demonstration of Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS) comparing it to Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The two data analysis techniques share historical origins but differ in terms of underlying algorithms, which gives rise to other key differences: (a) the treatment of unexplained in...

In the two-envelope problem, a reasoner is offered two envelopes, one containing exactly twice the money in the other. After observing the amount in one envelope, it can be traded for the unseen contents of the other. It appears that it should not matter whether the envelope is traded, but recent mathematical analyses have shown that gains could be...

"I feel fat" is a statement women, and increasingly men, often make. Clinical observations indicate that these feelings of fat are experienced more intensely and frequently in those who suffer from eating disorders. However, physical fat is not an emotion that one can "feel". According to body displacement theory, the propensity to mislabel fat as...

Research has consistently shown negative effects of multitasking on tasks such as problem solving. This study was designed to investigate the impact of an incentive when solving problems in a multitasking situation. Incentives have generally been shown to increase problem solving (e.g., Wieth & Burns, 2006), however, it is unclear whether an incent...

Building on dual-space theories, the three-space theory of problem-solving proposes a search of a model space in addition to search of experiment and hypothesis spaces. This study aimed at exploring the three postulated spaces, especially model space, by means of verbal protocols. Participants (N = 32) were asked to think aloud when working with a...

Learning new concepts by conducting experiments can be described as search in two spaces (Klahr & Dunbar, 1988): In hypothesis space, learners state hypotheses and infer rules, while in experiment space they test their hypotheses by experimenting. In their three-space theory, Burns and Vollmeyer (2000) suggested to add a third space, model space, w...

Building on dual-space theories, the three-space theory of problem solving suggests to add search of a model space in addition to search of experiment and hypothesis space. This study aimed at exploring the three postulated spaces, especially model space, by means of verbal protocols. Participants (n=32) were asked to think aloud while working with...

Our goal was to study how learning from a graphical physics programme is affected by prior knowledge and the amount participants interact with the graphics. Research has demonstrated that prior knowledge is an important predictor for learning (e.g., Hattie, 2008) and that animated graphics foster learning (Höffler & Leutner, 2007). We investigated...

One of the most influential studies in all expertise research is de Groot's (1946) study of chess players, which suggested that pattern recognition, rather than search, was the key determinant of expertise. Many changes have occurred in the chess world since de Groot's study, leading some authors to argue that the cognitive mechanisms underlying ex...

Recent decision making research has emphasized people's sensitivity to statistical relationships in the environment. A little-known relationship is Benford's law, that the first digits of numbers representing many natural and human phenomena have a logarithmic distribution (Benford, 1938). Benford's law is being used to help detect fraudulent finan...

Two experiments on decision making explored the role of the mechanism perceived to be generating events. In Experiment 1 participants were told about two identical basketball players who varied in terms of motivation in separate games. Both experienced the same streaks of shot success or failure, and participants predicted the motivated player was...

An increasing number of studies are showing a connection between emotion and motivation and cognitive processes. Most of these studies, however, have been correlational in nature, limiting the conclusions that can be drawn. We directly manipulated motivation through the use of an incentive and investigated its effects on insight and incremental pro...

There is growing evidence that hormones play an important role in a number of cognitive processes. This challenges the concept of the brain as a computer in favor of it being thought of as a gland. However studies of hormones and cognition have often lacked clear hypotheses. The current study based its hypothesis on an evolutionary analysis. Previo...

Streaks of past outcomes, for example of gains or losses in the stock market, are one source of information for a decision maker trying to predict the next outcome in the series. We examine how prediction biases based on streaks change as a function of length of the current streak. Participants experienced a sequence of 150 flips of a simulated coi...

The authors tested the thesis that people find the Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) hard because they fail to understand the implications of its causal structure, a collider structure in which 2 independent causal factors influence a single outcome. In 4 experiments, participants performed better in versions of the MHD involving competition, which emphasiz...

Two types of mechanisms may underlie chess skill: fast mechanisms, such as recognition, and slow mechanisms, such as search through the space of possible moves and responses. Speed distinguishes these mechanisms, so I examined archival data on blitz chess (5 min for the whole game), in which the opportunities for search are greatly reduced. If vari...

and analyzed reasoning by asking: what are the reasoner's goals? This emphasizes the adaptiveness of behavior rather than whether a belief is normative. Belief in the "hot hand" in basketball suggests that players experiencing streaks should be given more shots, but this has been seen as a fallacy due to failure to find dependencies between players...

Sometimes people believe that a run of similar independent events will be broken (belief in the gambler's fallacy) but, other times, that such a run will continue (belief in the hot hand). Both of these opposite inductions have been explained as being due to belief in a law of small numbers. We argue that one factor that distinguishes these phenome...

Streaks of past outcomes, for example of gains or losses in the stock market, are one source of information for a decision maker trying to predict the next outcome in the series. We examine how prediction biases based on streaks change as a function of length of the current streak. Participants experienced a sequence of 150 flips of a simulated coi...

Streaks of events are ubiquitous yet understanding the behavioral effects of them has been restricted by the lack of testable hypotheses concerning the most basic question: When do we tend to follow streaks (positive recency), and when do we tend to go against streaks (negative recency)? From an analysis of positive recency in terms of adaptivity,...

Problem solving research has found that a nonspecific goal (NSG) leads to better learning than a specific goal (SG). This effect can be understood in terms of dual-space search theories of problem solving. To apply the theory, we studied goal specificity effects with a hypermedia program in which participants had to learn about the outbreak of Worl...

Previous research has found that having a nonspecific goal (NSG) leads to better problem solving and transfer than having a specific goal (SG). To distinguish between the various explanations of this effect requires direct evidence showing how a NSG affects a participant's behaviour. Therefore we collected verbal protocols from participants learnin...

Zusammenfassung.Vorgestellt wird ein Fragebogen (FAM), der mit 18 Items vier Komponenten der aktuellen Motivation in (experimentellen) Lern- und Leistungssituationen erfasst, namlich Misserfolgsbefurchtung, Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeit, Interesse und Herausforderung. Die deutsche sowie eine amerikanische Version weisen zufriedenstellende Konsistenzen...

In their dual-space model, Klahr and Dunbar (1988) propose that problem space is separated into hypothesis space and experiment space. When searching the hypothesis space explicit hypotheses about the problem are generated which can be tested in experiment space by applying operators to generate new states. In the following two experiments we teste...

Previous research has found that nonspecific goals (NSG) lead to better learning than a specific goal (SG). We studied this effect with a multimedia program in which participants had to learn about the outbreak of World War 1 either with the goal to find twenty dates (i.e., SG) or with the goal to explain the reasons for the war (i.e., NSG). As exp...

Previous studies have shown a correlation between initial motivation and subsequent performance (e.g.

Schaut man in Fachwörter- oder Lehrbüchern nach, was man unter Problemlösen versteht, findet man ziemlich einheitlich die Definition, daß Problemlösen darin besteht, einen Anfangszustand in einen Zielzustand zu überführen. Allerdings wissen die Problemlöser noch nicht, wie und welche Mittel sie einsetzen sollen, um den Zielzustand zu erreichen. Zum...

Im August 1990 überfielen irakische Streitkräfte Kuwait. Die USA und die mit ihr alliierten Streitkräfte reagierten schnell und bezogen Position an der Grenze zwischen Saudi-Arabien und Kuwait, um weitere Eroberungsabsichten des Iraks zu vereiteln. Als Saudi-Arabien gesichert schien, tauchte eine neue Frage auf: Sollten die Streitkräfte in Saudi-Ar...

Competition has been studied as something to be averted, yet rarely has it been asked what processes may be involved in successful competition. The authors tested whether more accurate modeling of an adversary can assist competitive success. Pairs played a zero-sum game with no specific skill component over 40 trials. The authors measured the relat...

Meta-analogical transfer (i.e., transfer due to forming an analogy between analogies) was demonstrated in 4 experiments. Results suggest that the basis of meta-analogical transfer was transfer of predicate mappings (mappings of the concepts used to represent analogies) between separate episodes of analogical reasoning. Episodes of letter-string ana...

Theories of skill acquisition have made radically different predictions about the role of general problem-solving methods in acquiring rules that promote effec- tive transfer to new problems. Under one view, methods that focus on reaching specific goals, such as means-ends analysis, are assumed to provide the basis for efficient knowledge compilati...

Previous research has shown that there are strong constraints on the concurrent performance of nonharmonically related motor sequences such as polyrhythms. A model of polyrhythm production is proposed that involves a hierarchical timing system. The model assumes a single mechanism (a counter) for the timing and serial ordering of responses. Predict...

This study investigated the relative importance of perceptual and motor factors in the imitation of simple temporal patterns. Previous research in which subjects tap out interval sequences using one finger has suggested that perceptual factors play an important role in response timing. Studies of bimanual tapping, in contrast, stress the importance...

In basketball, players believe that they should "feed the hot hand," by giving the ball to a player more often if that player has hit a number of shots in a row. However, Gilovich, Vallone & Tversky (1985) analyzed basketball players' successive shots and showed that they are independent events. Thus the hot hand seems to be a fallacy. Taking the c...

In the Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD) contestants try to choose which of three doors conceals a prize. After selecting a door, one of the other doors is opened by a host who knows where the prize is, but always reveals a dud. Contestants are then asked if they want to stay with their first choice, or switch to the other unopened door? Switching yields a...

Law of small numbers has been used to explain Gambler's fallacy, but under what conditions will it predict people to go against streaks? • Experiment described sequences of coin-flips, used unequal base-rate, and varied streaks and generating mechanism (random vs nonrandom) • No evidence of gambler's fallacy for random mechanism, and nonrandom mech...

Many cognitive processes appear to incorporate threshold criteria, but when criteria are know to be random their use may appear irrational. For example, when people's estimates are influenced by random anchors (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). However Cover (1987) showed that choosing whether a seen or unseen number was greater is improved by using a ran...