Phil Maguire

Making sense of surprise: an investigation of the factors influencing surprise judgments.

Surprise is often defined in terms of disconfirmed expectations, whereby the surprisingness of an event is thought to be dependent on the degree to which it contrasts with a more likely, or expected, outcome. The authors investigated the alternative hypothesis that surprise is more accurately modeled as a manifestation of an ongoing sense-making process. In a series of experiments, participants were given a number of scenarios and rated surprise and probability for various hypothetical outcomes that either confirmed or disconfirmed an expectation. Experiment 1 demonstrated that representational specificity influences the relationship that holds between surprise and probability ratings. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the inclusion of an enabling event lowers surprise ratings for disconfirming outcomes. Experiment 3 explored the reason for this effect, revealing that enabling events lower surprise by reducing uncertainty, thus enhancing ease of integration. Experiment 4 evaluated the contrast hypothesis directly, showing that differences in contrast are not correlated with differences in surprise. These results provide converging support for the view that the level of surprise experienced for an event is related to the difficulty of integrating that event with an existing representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

A corpus study of semantic patterns in compounding

Abstract Studies of modifier-noun compounds have indicated that they tend to follow regular semantic patterns (e.g., Downing, Language 53: 810–842, 1977; Warren, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Gothenburg Studies in English Goteborg 41: 1–266, 1978). The results of several psycholinguistic studies have supported the hypothesis that people rely on statistical knowledge about how nouns tend to be used in combination in order to facilitate the interpretation of novel compounds (e.g., Gagné & Shoben, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 23: 71–87, 1997; Maguire, Maguire & Cater, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 36: 288–297, 2010; Storms & Wisniewski, Memory and Cognition 33: 852–861, 2005). We conducted a series of corpus analyses in order to establish the salience and reliability of semantic patterns in English compounds. These analyses demonstrated that similar concepts tend to appear in combination with similar sets of nouns. In addition, categorizing combinations according to the semantic category of the modifier and head revealed consistent regularities in productivity reflecting the likelihood of plausible relationships. These findings support the idea that statistical knowledge about semantic patterns in compounding can be used to facilitate the interpretation of novel compounds. The implications for existing theories and models of conceptual combination are discussed.

Engaging students emotionally: the role of emotional intelligence in predicting cognitive and affective engagement in higher education

ABSTRACT Student engagement is a key predictor of academic performance, persistence and retention in higher education. While many studies have identified how aspects of the college environment influence engagement, fewer have specifically focused on emotional intelligence (EI). In this study, we sought to explore whether EI could predict cognitive and/or affective engagement in a sample of undergraduate psychology students in Ireland. Ninety-one students completed two forms of the student engagement instrument, rating current engagement and retrospective secondary school engagement, along with the trait EI (TEI) questionnaire. After controlling for academic ability, gender and school engagement, multiple regression analyses found TEI to be a positive predictor of both cognitive and affective engagement. Previous academic performance acted as an additional predictor of cognitive engagement, while retrospective affective school engagement predicted current affective engagement. These results suggest that interventions aimed at increasing EI may have positive implications for many aspects of student engagement, and hence performance at third level.

The Influence of Interactional Semantic Patterns on the Interpretation of Noun-Noun Compounds

The CARIN theory (C. L. Gagné & E. J. Shoben, 1997) proposes that people use statistical knowledge about the relations with which modifiers are typically used to facilitate the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations. However, research on semantic patterns in compounding has suggested that regularities tend to be associated with pairings of semantic categories, rather than individual concepts (e.g., P. Maguire, E. J. Wisniewski, & G. Storms, in press; B. Warren, 1978). In the present study, the authors investigated whether people are sensitive to interactional semantic patterns in compounding. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the influence of a given modifier on ease of interpretation varies depending on the semantic category of the head. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the relation preference of the head noun influences ease of interpretation when the semantic category of the modifier is compatible with that preference. In light of these findings, the authors suggest that people are sensitive to how different semantic categories tend to be paired in combination and that this information is used to facilitate the interpretation process.

Is conceptual combination influenced by word order

We describe two experiments using French noun-noun combinations which parallel a study carried out by Gagne (2001) using English combinations. The order of the modifier and head noun are reversed in French, allowing us to investigate whether the influence of relation priming that Gagne found is due to the order of the modifier and head noun or whether it is due to their different functional roles. While our findings indicate that interpretation is influenced by previous exposure to combinations incorporating one of the same constituent nouns, the results show that primes with the same modifier have a greater influence when associated with a different relation to the target. This pattern of influence is similar to that found in English and suggests that the modifier is exclusively involved in relation selection, irrespective of its order in a combination.

The Influence of Social Comparison and Peer Group Size on Risky Decision-Making

This study explores the influence of different social reference points and different comparison group sizes on risky decision-making. Participants were presented with a scenario describing an exam, and presented with the opportunity of making a risky decision in the context of different information provided about the performance of their peers. We found that behavior was influenced, not only by comparison with peers, but also by the size of the comparison group. Specifically, the larger the reference group, the more polarized the behavior it prompted. In situations describing social loss, participants were led to make riskier decisions after comparing themselves against larger groups, while in situations describing social gain, they become more risk averse. These results indicate that decision making is influenced both by social comparison and the number of people making up the social reference group.

The role of experience in the interpretation of noun---noun combinations

Gagné and Shoben’s (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 23:71–87, 1997) Competition Among Relations In Nominals (CARIN) theory maintains that the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations is influenced primarily by how the modifying noun has been used in the past. As support for this theory, they found that modifiers typically associated with the instantiated relation are interpreted reliably faster than those whose modifiers are less frequently associated with the relation. The CARIN theory explains this phenomenon by proposing that people store statistical distributions regarding the frequency with which modifying nouns have combined with each relation in the past. However, we maintain that an association between relation frequency and response time does not imply a causal influence. In this study we explore whether the effects observed by Gagné and Shoben were caused by the influence of relation frequency per se. Two experiments were conducted in which experiential knowledge about the modifier was controlled. The first experiment involved combinations whose modifiers were relatively rare and the second involved the presentation of nouns without a modifier-head syntax. In both of these experiments, knowledge about historical modifier usage was irrelevant. Our results show that correlations between modifier preference and response time persist even in situations where a knowledge of the modifier’s history is not available. These findings provide converging evidence that the relationship between relation frequency and response time is not a causal one. Instead, an understanding of the relationship between modifier properties and usage, as appropriate to the given context, may be the dominant influence on interpretation in many circumstances. In light of this, we propose an alternative account of the factors influencing ease of interpretation.

Maximizing positive porfolio diversification

We introduce a new strategy for optimal diversification which combines elements of Diversified Risk Parity and Diversification Ratio, with emphasis on positive risk premiums. The Uncorrelated Positive Bets strategy involves the identification of reliable, independent sources of randomness and the quantification of their positive risk premium. We use principal component analysis to identify the most significant sources of randomness contributing to the market and then apply the Randomness Deficiency Coefficient metric and principal portfolio positivity to identify a set of reliable uncorrelated positive bets. Portfolios are then optimized by maximizing their diversified positive risk premium. We contrast the performance of a range of diversification strategies for a portfolio held for a two-year out-of-sample period with a 30 stock constraint. In particular, we introduce the notion of diversification inefficiency to explain why diversification strategies might outperform the market.

A probabilistic risk-to-reward measure for evaluating the performance of financial securities

Existing risk-to-reward measures, such as the Sharpe ratio [1] or M2 [2], are based on the idea of quantifying the excess return per unit of deviation in an investment. In this preliminary article we introduce a new probabilistic measure for evaluating investment performance. Randomness Deficiency Coefficient (RDC) expresses the likelihood that the observed excess return of an investment has been generated by chance. Some of the advantages of RDC over existing measures are that it can be used with small historical datasets, is time-frame independent, and can be easily adjusted to take into account the familywise error rate which results from selection bias. We argue that RDC captures the fundamental relationship between risk and reward and prove that it converges with Sharpes ratio.

Risk-adjusted portfolio optimisation using a parallel multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

In this article we describe the use of a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for portfolio optimisation based on historical data for the S&P 500. Portfolio optimisation seeks to identify manageable investments that provide a high expected return with relatively low risk. We developed a set of metrics for qualifying the risk/return characteristics of a portfolios historical performance and combined this with an island model genetic algorithm to identify optimised portfolios. The algorithm was successful in selecting investment strategies with high returns and relatively low volatility. However, although these solutions performed well on historical data, they were not predictive of future returns, with optimised portfolios failing to perform above chance. The implications of these findings are discussed.