Fischer Martin H, Shaki Samuel
Division of Cognitive Science, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel.
Front Psychol. 2018 Dec 5;9:2453. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02453. eCollection 2018.
Even simple mental arithmetic is fraught with cognitive biases. For example, adding repeated numbers (so-called tie problems, e.g., 2 + 2) not only has a speed and accuracy advantage over adding different numbers (e.g., 1 + 3) but may also lead to under-representation of the result relative to a standard value (Charras et al., 2012, 2014). Does the tie advantage merely reflect easier encoding or retrieval compared to non-ties, or also a distorted result representation? To answer this question, 47 healthy adults performed two tasks, both of which indicated under-representation of tie results: In a result-to-position pointing task (Experiment 1) we measured the spatial mapping of numbers and found a left-bias for tie compared to non-tie problems. In a result-to-line-length production task (Experiment 2) we measured the underlying magnitude representation directly and obtained shorter lines for tie- compared to non-tie problems. These observations suggest that the processing benefit of tie problems comes at the cost of representational reduction of result meaning. This conclusion is discussed in the context of a recent model of arithmetic heuristics and biases.
即使是简单的心算也充满了认知偏差。例如，相加重复数字（即所谓的连加问题，如2 + 2）不仅在速度和准确性上比相加不同数字（如1 + 3）更具优势，而且相对于标准值，其结果的呈现可能也会不足（查拉斯等人，2012年，2014年）。连加优势仅仅反映了与非连加问题相比更容易编码或检索，还是也反映了结果呈现的扭曲？为了回答这个问题，47名健康成年人完成了两项任务，这两项任务都表明连加结果的呈现不足：在结果到位置的指向任务（实验1）中，我们测量了数字的空间映射，发现与非连加问题相比，连加问题存在左偏差。在结果到线长生成任务（实验2）中，我们直接测量了潜在的数量表征，发现与非连加问题相比，连加问题的线更短。这些观察结果表明，连加问题的处理优势是以结果意义的表征减少为代价的。这一结论将在最近的算术启发式和偏差模型的背景下进行讨论。
