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Measuring the Subjective Value of Risky and Ambiguous Options using Experimental Economics and Functional MRI Methods
Published on: September 19, 2012
The cognitive substrate of subjective probability
Håkan Nilsson1, Henrik Olsson, Peter Juslin
1Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, SE-751 42 Uppsala, Sweden. hakan.nilsson@psyk.uu.se
Abstract:
The prominent cognitive theories of probability judgment were primarily developed to explain cognitive biases rather than to account for the cognitive processes in probability judgment. In this article the authors compare 3 major theories of the processes and representations in probability judgment: the representativeness heuristic, implemented as prototype similarity, relative likelihood, or evidential support accumulation (ESAM; D. J. Koehler, C. M. White, & R. Grondin, 2003); cue-based relative frequency; and exemplar memory, implemented by probabilities from exemplars (PROBEX; P. Juslin & M. Persson, 2002). Three experiments with different task structures consistently demonstrate that exemplar memory is the best account of the data whereas the results are inconsistent with extant formulations of the representativeness heuristic and cue-based relative frequency.
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