Using statistical reasoning performance to reveal information parsing preferences in the mind

Abstract

Many cognitive tasks require the parsing of information into smaller, discrete units in order to enable effective information processing. This parsing can, broadly speaking, be done along either situationally ad hoc dimensions or done preferentially along ecologically and evolutionarily relevant dimensions. The present research systematically evaluates these two possibilities within a statistical reasoning context. While replicating results that appear to support the partition-edit-count hypothesis (that item parsing is equipotential, based on subtle linguistic cues), this result was found to be in large part due to confounds in the nature of the tasks rather than the partitioning manipulations (Experiment 1). Additionally, a frequency presentation of the same task not only eliminated the earlier confounds but also improved performance directly and as predicted by the alternative hypothesis (Experiment 2). Attempts to reintroduce a biasing partition frame (Experiment 3) and a process study of participants’ task representation (Experiment 4) also both failed to support the partition-edit-count hypothesis. These results favour an ecological rationality perspective and the associated frequency and individuation hypotheses regarding statistical reasoning (i.e., a privileged status for frequency representations to guide parsing of objects, events, and locations into easily countable units).

Keywords:

• Information parsing
• Statistical reasoning
• Probability
• Partitioning
• Frequencies

The author would like to thank Laurence Fiddick, Craig Fox, and Sandra Brase for comments and advice regarding this research.

Notes

¹There are a couple of very notable issues which are raised in comparing the partition-edit-count hypothesis and the individuation hypothesis, but that do not bear directly on the current research. First, as a reviewer noted, the individuation hypothesis implies that at least some of the parsing of environmental information occurs at the time of encoding and storage in memory. That parsed information is then retrieved for use, already somewhat constrained in how it is represented. The partition-edit-count hypothesis, in contrast, implies that parsing occurs either only during retrieval or that all possible parsings are considered during encoding and storage (allowing for complete plasticity at retrieval). It is possible that research focused more on the memory aspects of information encoding and storage could also be useful in terms of discriminating predictions between these two hypotheses. Second, a complication of some previous comparisons of these hypotheses is that the partition-edit-count hypothesis has sometimes been compared to a narrow construal of the individuation hypothesis by implying that the individuation hypothesis does not admit to any ability by people to work with anything other than whole objects (e.g., Fox & Levav, 2004, p. 634). This complete lack of plasticity, as noted previously, is not an actual position anyone has taken, and the individuation hypothesis is actually quite clear that:

The existence of sciences that investigate the properties of subatomic particles, gases, and waves shows that the human mind is capable of individuating an astonishing array of events. But some ways of parsing the world may be more natural than others – faster, more automatic, and cross-culturally universal, emerging without conscious deliberation and in the absence of explicit instruction. (Brase et al., 1998, p. 8)