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The purpose of this study was to characterize the ways inwhich psychologists address research hypothesis risk inacademic articles, and to support undergraduates in learningto write about such risk using argument diagramming prewritingactivities. First, 90 articles recently published in topsocial, developmental, and cognitive psychology journalswere examined for their presentation of research hypothesis‘risk’ – an element of the intellectual merit of a research studydenoting the novelty and importance of the study beingconducted. Second, an experimental study was conductedinvolving 82 students in undergraduate research methodsclasses. They were assigned to either argument diagram ortraditional instruction conditions. Research reports werecoded for explicit discussion of risk. Students using argumentdiagramming were significantly more likely to write aboutrisk when compared to matched classes given nodiagramming support

Symbolic and non-symbolic number representations arethought to share common neural substrates. However, recentstudies have shown that the two numerical systems are moredistinct than previously thought. These disparate findings maybe explained by the use of sequential presentations of symbolicand non-symbolic quantities, the use of magnitude-relianttasks, or the use of limited number ranges. We investigatedwhether adults integrate symbolic and non-symbolic numericalinformation during a non-magnitude-based task in whichsymbolic and non-symbolic double-digit numerical informationis shown simultaneously. Participants viewed imagesin which symbolic numerals or letter pairs were superimposedon non-symbolic numerical stimuli and were asked to determinewhether the text was a numeral or letter, ignoring thedots. After perceptual biases were taken into account, participantswere more accurate and faster in their judgments whensymbolic and non-symbolic information matched than wheninformation mismatched, suggesting that adults can integratesymbolic and non-symbolic numerical information

How much information about meaning is contained in the statistical structure of the environment? LSA is a theoretical and practical tool that is challenging previous notions about what is contained in the statistical structure of the environment. This paper examines what kind of category knowledge can be obtained from the environment using LSA. In particular, two experiments are conducted with LSA to test what kind of category structure it embodies. LSA ratings about the relatedness of categories to their properties are compared with human judgments regarding the centrality of properties to the categories. LSA is found to capture aspects of property centrality for some object and event categories. However, it is found to only capture those aspects related to typicality: how often do members of the category have that property? LSA fails to capture other aspects of centrality that can be found in human category judgments. Thus, it appears that humans do bring other constraints to bear in shaping their categories.

Adaptivity is examined within a complex task environment: the Kanfer-Ackerman Air Traffic Controller Task. A computational model is developed in ACT-R to account for such adaptivity using an implicit learning mechanism.

Previous research on scientific reasoning has shown that it involves a diverse set of skills. Yet, little is known about generality of those skills, an important issue to theories of expertise and to attempts to automate scientific reasoning skills. We present a study examining what kinds of skills psychologists actually use in designing and interpreting experiments. The results suggest: 1) that psychologists use many domain-general skills in their experimentation; 2) that bright and motivated undergraduates are missing many of these skills; 3) some domain-general skills are not specific to only scientists; and 4) some domain-specific skills can be acquired with minimal domain-experience.

The field of cognitive science is inherently multi?disciplinary. However, it is unclear to what extent truly interdisciplinary work occurs in cognitive science. That is, is cognitive science merely a collection of researchers from different disciplines working separately on commo n problems? Data gathered from a recent cognitive science conference are presented. Interestingly, a significant proportion of interdisciplinary collaborations were found. Analyses were also conducted on the impact of same vs. different backgrounds on the structure of collaborations, and It was found that interdisciplinary collaborations involved more equally distributed contributions among the authors than did intradisciplinary collaborations.

An extension of Klahr and Dunbar's (1988) Dual space model of scientific discovery is presented. W e propose that, in addition to search in an experiment space and a hypothesis space, scientific discovery involves search in two additional spaces; the space of data representations and the space of experimental paradigms. That is, discoveries often involve developing new terms and adding new features to descriptions of the data, and the also often involve developing new kinds of experimental procedures. The 4-space model was motivated by the analysis of human performance in a discovery microworld. A brief description of the data is presented. In addition to the general 4-space framework, a description of the component processes involved in each of the four search spaces is also presented

Other-generated hypotheses are often considered easierto test than self-generated hyptitheses. T o determinethe precise effects of other-generated hypotheses, w epropose three kinds of effects and describe a studydesigned to test for these effects of hypothesis source.T h e three kinds of effects considered are: (i) hypothesisplausibility changes, (ii) skepticism changes, and (iii)process changes. Forty-two undergraduate subjectswere given a microworld discovery task calledMilktruck. Subjects either had to generate their o w ninitial hypothesis or were given the most frequentlygenerated hypothesis. It w a s found that the other-generated hypothesis lead to m o r e thoroughinvestigation of hypotheses resulting in a decrease infalse terminations with incorrect solutions. T h e resultssuggested these effects were caused by an increjise inskepticism rather than changes in hypothesisplausibility or process changes.

Previous psychological research about scientific discovery has often focused on subjects' heuristics for discovering simple concepts with one relevant dimension or a few relevant dimensions with simple two-way interactions. This p^er presents results from an experiment in which subjects had to discover a concept involving complex three-way interactions on a multi-valued output by running experiments in a computerized microworld. Twenty-two C M U undergraduates attempted the task, of which sixteen succeeded, in an average of 85 minutes. The analyses focus on three strategies used to regulate task complexity. First, subjects preferred depth-first to breadth-first search, with successful subjects regulating the number of features varied from experiment to experiment most effectively. Second, subjects systematically regulated the length of their experiments. Third, a new explicit search heuristic (Put Upon Stack Heuristic) used by successful subjects is described.

One of the most frequently mentioned sources of scientific hypotheses is analogy. Despite attractiveness of this mechanism of discovery, there has been but a small success in demonstrating that people actually use analogies while solving problems. The study reported below attempted to foster analogical U-ansfer in a scientific discovery task. Subjects worked on two problems that had the same type of underlying mechanism. On day 1, subjects discovered the mechanism that controls virus reproduction. On day 2, subjects returned to work on a problem in molecular genetics that had a similar underlying mechanism. The results showed that experience at discovering the virus mechanism did facilitate performance on the molecular genetics task. However, the verbal protocols do not indicate that subjects analogically mapped knowledge from the virus to the genetics domain. Rather, experience with the virus problem appeared to prime memory. It is argued that analogical mapping can be used flexibly in scientific discovery contexts and that primed knowledge structures can also provide access to relevant information when analogical mapping fails.