ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2021
What facilitates Bayesian reasoning? A crucial test of ecological rationality versus nested sets hypotheses.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Analyzing and supporting mental representations and strategies in solving Bayesian problems.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The Use of Visualizations to Improve Bayesian Reasoning: A Literature Review.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Analyzing and supporting mental representations and strategies in solving Bayesian problems.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Measuring people's covariational reasoning in Bayesian situations.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Which cognitive individual differences predict good Bayesian reasoning? Concurrent comparisons of underlying abilities.Memory & cognition · 2021Article
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Abstract
Different theoretical views about Bayesian reasoning (ecological rationality and nested sets views) both claim support from results showing that natural sampling, whole numbers, and pictorial representations help with reasoning performance, although they differ in explaining how those results occur. Three studies (total N = 653) use minimally different numerical presentation formats-varying the singular or plural tense of the context story topic-and presence or absence of an additional icon array picture, to better understand the mechanisms driving these reasoning performance results. Plural wording, indicating a conceptual aggregation (i.e., frequencies) rather than just numerical whole numbers, consistently boosted performance. Icon arrays, in contrast, were helpful only when alongside single-tense information. These results fit more consistently with an ecological rationality view which has long argued that the mind is adapted to work best with frequentist information.
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