Towards understanding the cognitive representations underlying unsupervised judgment

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Janina Hoffmann
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 325158006

The ability to form judgments is a core capacity in personal and professional life. Individuals spontaneously form impressions about strangers based upon their appearance, employees prioritize their daily duties according to their urgency and importance, and lecturers grade their students essays considering their arguments and writing style. The goal of human judgment research has been to understand how people integrate multiple pieces of information to form an accurate judgment and update their knowledge using feedback. Over the past decade, the view emerged that people construct different cognitive representations, rule based and similarity based, depending on the properties of the judgment task. A variety of judgment tasks in daily life, however, neither presuppose a normative correct answer, nor do individuals receive an obvious external feedback signal on a regular basis. Yet, how people learn to form such unsupervised judgments, has received little attention in judgment research. Applied research fields have put a stronger emphasis on the question of which information people consider in unsupervised judgments and have similarly adopted the view that people can construct multiple cognitive representations. Yet, this research has not rigorously spelled out how people solve unsupervised judgment problems and neglected that task properties trigger different cognitive representations. The goal of the proposed project is to close this gap in the literature and to shed light on the question of how people form judgments in the absence of feedback in four studies. Study 1 will systematically investigate which task properties may give rise to different cognitive representations in unsupervised judgment and compare if people construct similar representations in unsupervised judgment as in judgment tasks conveying outcome feedback. Study 2 and 3 more thoroughly explore how those different cognitive representations evolve during the course of learning. Specifically, Study 2 examines if people consider new information after forming an initial representation and to what degree they integrate this new information into their established representation. In turn, Study 3 investigates how new information interferes with initially established representations and can distort the initial judgment. Finally, in Study 4, I aim to develop a cognitive learning model that allows more precise predictions about how task properties and the learning path interact to form different representations in judgments. In sum, the current project aims to identify how people form judgments in the absence of feedback. By varying task properties and tracing the learning path, the project contributes to the question of how people establish and reconsider different representations in. Understanding which representations people form in the absence of feedback will provide new insights into the assumptions underlying daily judgments and hopefully offer new ways to improve them.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants