Gregg C. Oden’s research while affiliated with University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh and other places

Subjects made lexical decisions after reading either (a) low-constraint sentence contexts that did not predict the identity or meaning of congruous targets (e.g. “Mary went to her room to look at her XXXX”), or (b) control contexts that were randomly ordered lists of words. The crucial variable was the validity of the contextual information. When the sentence contexts were incongrous with the word targets as often as they were congruous (the “less-valid environment”), the congruous contexts had a slight inhibitory effect on decision latency relative to the baseline condition. In contrast, when the contexts were always congruous with the word targets (“valid environment”), they had a large facilitatory effect on decision latency. These results suggest that (a) the effects of congruous contexts can depend on the validity of the contexts across the entire experimental session, and (b) contextual facilitation may be due in part to sentence level processes.

The case for the independence of featural processing supports Merge and FLMP alike. The target article's criticisms of the latter model are founded on misunderstanding its application to natural language processing. In fact, the main difference in the functional properties of the models is the FLMP's ability to account for graded perceptual experience. @T3:It is startling to be informed that beliefs you have held for a quarter of a century are indefensible and implausible. So it comes as a relief to discover that it was all just a big misunderstanding.

In recent years, descriptive models of risky choice have incorporated features that reflect the importance of particular outcome values in choice. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) does this by inserting a reference point in the utility function. SP/A (security-potential/aspiration) theory uses aspiration level as a second criterion in the choice process. Experiment 1 compares the ability of the CPT and SP/A models to account for the same within-subjects data set and finds in favor of SP/A. Experiment 2 replicates the main finding of Experiment 1 in a between-subjects design. The final discussion brackets the SP/A result by showing the impact on fit of both decreasing and increasing the number of free parameters. We also suggest how the SP/A approach might be useful in modeling investment decision making in a descriptively more valid way and conclude with comments on the relation between descriptive and normative theories of risky choice. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.

While psychologists have known for some time that people use categories with blurred edges and gradations of membership, the field has been slow to take up ideas from fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic. Despite critiques and controversies, by the late 80’s fuzzy sets achieved a degree of legitimacy in psychology. This chapter reviews recent developments and the current state of fuzzy set theory and applications in psychology. Beginning with the gradient thesis, it surveys the uses of fuzzy sets in the operationalization and measurement of psychological concepts. The focus then shifts to modeling and data analytic techniques, and ends with a review of psychological theories and frameworks that use fuzzy sets. Because of space limitations, many topics and important works have had to be treated with more brevity than we would have wished, but we have striven for a balanced account of this diverse and still rapidly growing literature.

M. A. Pitt (1995a) studied the joint influence of phonological information and lexical context in W. F. Ganong's (1980) task. Pitt improved on earlier studies by collecting enough observations to make possible the quantitative analyses of an individual's data. The present article shows that the results of such analyses demonstrate that the integration of phonological information and lexical context is very well accounted for by the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). Although Pitt concluded that the results of his research argued against the FLMP in favor of an interactive feedback system, his conclusion was based on an analysis of transformed results. It is argued that this use of a response transformation led to incorrect conclusions and that ultimately, models must be tested directly against observed behavior.

This chapter describes a chunk of an ongoing research program. The theoretical framework guided and informed the research that developed a solution to a fundamental problem of cognitive psychology. The problem is to make models perform interesting cognition without being overly sensitive to perturbations in the input. To achieve this goal, depends there are two basic design principles: robustness requires compensatory integration and complex computation requires structural diversity. The classic form of continuous integration is addition. FuzzyProp allows (1) that the fundamental or primitive concepts/features are fuzzy predicates that may hold more or less in a given situation and (2) that the connective operators are also fuzzy in that they preserve the fuzziness introduced by the primitives.

Subjects classified individual stimuli as exact copies or as distortions of previously viewed prototype letters. Perceptual adjustments were induced by the presence of difficult (subtle) distortions within the stimulus set. In Experiment 1, subjects initially made feature-based adjustments, and, with experience, adjustments became identity-based. Decisional adjustments also occurred. A similar change over time was obtained in Experiment 2; in addition, the feature-based adjustments could not be explained by overall similarity between letters. Experiment 3 indicated that feature-based adjustments can be long lasting under appropriate circumstances. Experiment 4 indicated that the relevant features are not functionally independent parts of letters, but rather relations between neighboring parts. The results are consistent with the idea that adjustments can change between levels over time, and that the adjusted features are relational in nature.