Fabio Del Missier

Executive functions in decision making: An individual differences approach

This individual differences study examined the relationships between three executive functions (updating, shifting, and inhibition), measured as latent variables, and performance on two cognitively demanding subtests of the Adult Decision Making Competence battery: Applying Decision Rules and Consistency in Risk Perception. Structural equation modelling showed that executive functions contribute differentially to performance in these two tasks, with Applying Decision Rules being mainly related to inhibition and Consistency in Risk Perception mainly associated to shifting. The results suggest that the successful application of decision rules requires the capacity to selectively focus attention and inhibit irrelevant (or no more relevant) stimuli. They also suggest that consistency in risk perception depends on the ability to shift between judgement contexts.

The Cognitive Effectiveness of Subtitle Processing

In an experimental study, we analyzed the cognitive processing of a subtitled film excerpt by adopting a methodological approach based on the integration of a variety of measures: eye-movement data, word recognition, and visual scene recognition. We tested the hypothesis that the processing of subtitled films is cognitively effective: It leads to a good understanding of film content without requiring a significant tradeoff between image processing and text processing. Following indications in the psycholinguistic literature, we also tested the hypothesis that two-line subtitles whose segmentation is syntactically incoherent can have a disruptive effect on information processing and recognition performance. The results highlighted the effectiveness of subtitle processing: Regardless of the quality of line segmentation, participants had a good understanding of the film content, they achieved good levels of performance in both word and scene recognition, and no tradeoff between text and image processing was detected. Eye-movement analyses enabled a further characterization of cognitive processing during subtitled film viewing. This article discusses the theoretical implications of the findings for both subtitling and multiple-source communication and highlights their methodological and applied implications.

The multifold relationship between memory and decision making: an individual-differences study.

Several judgment and decision-making tasks are assumed to involve memory functions, but significant knowledge gaps on the memory processes underlying these tasks remain. In a study on 568 adults between 25 and 80 years of age, hypotheses were tested on the specific relationships between individual differences in working memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory, respectively, and 6 main components of decision-making competence. In line with the hypotheses, working memory was positively related with the more cognitively demanding tasks (Resistance to Framing, Applying Decision Rules, and Under/Overconfidence), whereas episodic memory was positively associated with a more experience-based judgment task (Recognizing Social Norms). Furthermore, semantic memory was positively related with 2 more knowledge-based decision-making tasks (Consistency in Risk Perception and Resistance to Sunk Costs). Finally, the age-related decline observed in some of the decision-making tasks was (partially or totally) mediated by the age-related decline in working memory or episodic memory. These findings are discussed in relation to the functional roles fulfilled by different memory processes in judgment and decision-making tasks.

Editorial: The cognitive modeling of human behavior: Why a model is (sometimes) better than 10,000 words

This special issue of Cognitive Systems Research presents a collection of remarkable papers on cognitive modeling based on communications delivered at ICCM-2006, the Seventh International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (Fum, Del Missier, & Stocco, 2006) held in Trieste, Italy, from April 5th to 8th, 2006. Being the organizers and chairmen of the conference, we have been invited to serve as guest editors for this issue. We therefore solicited some participants to reexamine their contributions, and to change them in form of journal articles. In particular, we asked authors to review what they had presented during the conference focusing on the benefits cognitive modeling could provide to cognitive science. The issue you are reading is the result of this editorial process. In this introductory commentary we would like to set the stage for what follows by illustrating the advantages and disadvantages of cognitive modeling, and by presenting a minimal set of requirements for a good modeling practice. Then, we will briefly preview the papers composing this special issue, and we will emphasize how they deal with the issues discussed in the previous sections.

Decision Making in Adults With ADHD

Objectives: This study examined decision-making competence in ADHD by using multiple decision tasks with varying demands on analytic versus affective processes. Methods: Adults with ADHD and healthy controls completed two tasks of analytic decision making, as measured by the Adult Decision-Making Competence (A-DMC) battery, and two affective decision tasks (the Balloon Analog Risk Task and the lowa Gambling Task). Results: Although a majority of the ADHD participants were tested under medication, they showed impairments in both types of task. However, logistic regression analysis showed that the applying-decision-rules task of the A-DMC battery was the only significant predictor of ADHD status. Conclusions: These findings suggested that ADHD is associated with impaired decision making in tasks involving a significant degree of cognitive control. Although both deliberative and affective neurocognitive systems probably contributed to ADHD-related problems in decision making, the findings underlined the involvement of prefrontally mediated executive functions.

Dubbing versus subtitling in young and older adults: cognitive and evaluative aspects

Empirical evidence on the cognitive and evaluative effects of viewing a dubbed versus a subtitled film is limited, theoretical views on the subject are mainly speculative, and age-related differences have not been investigated in this sphere. To fill these gaps, we carried out two studies contrasting the effects of viewing a dubbed versus subtitled version of the same film excerpt in young and older adults, using a comprehensive array of verbal and visual measures. The findings clearly show that dubbing does not provide a cognitive or evaluative advantage over subtitling. Moreover, subtitling seems to be more effective than dubbing in supporting the lexical aspects of performance. Finally, although older adults always performed worse than young adults on all cognitive measures, they did not show a specific impairment in the subtitling condition. The results support the view that subtitled films are processed effectively and appreciated equally by both young and older adults.

Aging, Memory, and Decision Making

Aging differentially affects diverse aspects of memory functioning. In turn, memory changes have specific effects on different judgment and decision-making tasks. This chapter focuses on the consequences of age-related changes in memory processes—including working memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, and implicit memory—and how these changes affect performance on judgment and decision-making tasks. A review of relevant research shows how the decline in working memory negatively affects performance on the more cognitively demanding decision-making tasks. It also shows that working memory plays a central role in explaining the age-related decline in decision making. Moreover, the review illustrates how different memory processes, showing distinct age-related trajectories, may functionally support performance on different kinds of judgment and decision-making tasks. Finally, the chapter discusses how age-related memory changes may interact with other cognitive and noncognitive changes in shaping decision-making behavior.

Option generation in decision making: ideation beyond memory retrieval.

According to prescriptive decision theories, the generation of options for choice is a central aspect of decision making. A too narrow representation of the problem may indeed limit the opportunity to evaluate promising options. However, despite the theoretical and applied significance of this topic, the cognitive processes underlying option generation are still unclear. In particular, while a cued recall account of option generation emphasizes the role of memory and executive control, other theoretical proposals stress the importance of ideation processes based on various search and thinking processes. Unfortunately, relevant behavioral evidence on the cognitive processes underlying option generation is scattered and inconclusive. In order to reach a better understanding, we carried out an individual-differences study employing a wide array of cognitive predictors, including measures of episodic memory, semantic memory, cognitive control, and ideation fluency. The criterion tasks consisted of three different poorly-structured decision-making scenarios, and the participants were asked to generate options to solve these problems. The main criterion variable of the study was the number of valid options generated, but also the diversity and the quality of generated options were examined. The results showed that option generation fluency and diversity in the context of ill-structured decision making are supported by ideation ability even after taking into account the effects of individual differences in several other aspects of cognitive functioning. Thus, ideation processes, possibly supported by search and thinking processes, seem to contribute to option generation beyond basic associative memory retrieval. The findings of the study also indicate that generating more options may have multifaceted consequences for choice, increasing the quality of the best option generated but decreasing the mean quality of the options in the generated set.

Part-set cuing in option generation

Memory research on the part-set cuing effect has shown that providing some of the to-be-remembered items as cues is not always beneficial and, in some cases, may even hurt retrieval. However, part-set cuing has been sparsely investigated in option generation tasks. Thus, limited empirical evidence for the existence of the effect in option generation is available, and no convincing explanation has been provided yet. In order to fill these gaps, we carried out four experiments. In Experiment 1A, we observed a significant decrease in option generation performance when potential options were presented as cues. Experiment 1B showed that the effect can also be obtained in older adults. Experiments 2A and 2B provided evidence compatible with an inhibition-based explanation of the observed effects.

Deadlines in space: Selective effects of coordinate spatial processing in multitasking

Many everyday activities require coordination and monitoring of multiple deadlines. One way to handle these temporal demands might be to represent future goals and deadlines as a pattern of spatial relations. We examined the hypothesis that spatial ability, in addition to executive functioning, contributes to individual differences in multitasking. In two studies, participants completed a multitasking session in which they monitored four digital clocks running at different rates. In Study 1, we found that individual differences in spatial ability and executive functions were independent predictors of multiple-task performance. In Study 2, we found that individual differences in specific spatial abilities were selectively related to multiple-task performance, as only coordinate spatial processing, but not categorical, predicted multitasking, even beyond executive functioning and numeracy. In both studies, males outperformed females in spatial ability and multitasking and in Study 2 these sex differences generalized to a simulation of everyday multitasking. Menstrual changes moderated the effects on multitasking, in that sex differences in coordinate spatial processing and multitasking were observed between males and females in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, but not between males and females at menses. Overall, these findings suggest that multiple-task performance reflects independent contributions of spatial ability and executive functioning. Furthermore, our results support the distinction of categorical versus coordinate spatial processing, and suggest that these two basic relational processes are selectively affected by female sex hormones and differentially effective in transforming and handling temporal patterns as spatial relations in the context of multitasking.