Recent research suggests that phonotactic probability (the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence) and neighborhood density (the number of words phonologically similar to a given word) influence spoken language processing and acquisition across the lifespan in both normal and clinical populations. The majority of research in this area has…

Children's immediate aggressive responding to exposure to marital conflict was examined. Participants were 108 families with 8- to 16-year-old children (53 boys, 55 girls), with diary records of children's reactions to marital conflict in the home completed by 103 mothers (n = 578 records) and 95 fathers (n = 377 records) during a 15-day period.…

Rasch proposed an exact conditional inference approach to testing his model but never implemented it because it involves the calculation of a complicated probability. This paper furthers Rasch's approach by (1) providing an efficient Monte Carlo methodology for accurately approximating the required probability and (2) illustrating the usefulness…

Since the game SET[R] was first introduced to the public in 1993, it has stimulated some interesting studies. While the game itself is rather straightforward, a plethora of decent mathematical questions lies beneath the surface. It is perhaps because the game ties in so closely with such an underlying mathematical term that its implications can be…

Transitions are critical times for both teachers and students. Efficient between-task and within-task transitions can greatly improve academic learning time. The purpose of this article was to review one intervention, high-probability (high-p) task sequences, as a method to promote more effective transitions. High-p sequences involve presenting a…

The presidential election that frequently features the results of political polling is presented. These polls attempt to estimate the popular vote that each candidate would receive as they could predict who would win the elections.

The recognition heuristic is a prime example of a boundedly rational mind tool that rests on an evolved capacity, recognition, and exploits environmental structures. When originally proposed, it was conjectured that no other probabilistic cue reverses the recognition-based inference (D. G. Goldstein & G. Gigerenzer, 2002). More recent studies…

A special but common type of scenario is one in which a company has a promotion that is designed to make the customer purchase more of their product than they otherwise might. Although this can be aimed specifically at children, it really applies to all persons. The basic premise is that the company issues a "set" of different items or…

The author derives the probability that price discrimination improves social welfare, using a simple model of third-degree price discrimination assuming two independent linear demands. The probability that price discrimination raises social welfare increases as the preferences or incomes of consumer groups become more heterogeneous. He derives the…

In Experiment 1, 12 senior citizens from the community were trained with 18 sets of conditional discriminations. Training included 2-, 3-, and 4-choice matching-to-sample (MTS) configurations in linear series (LS), many-to-one (MTO), and one-to-many (OTM) training structures. Training structure order was counterbalanced across participants. The…

A discussion on the use of group question on final exams is presented to approach work units on probability or counting. Where it is easy to find problems that are both nonroutine and will stretch students minds a bit. The group question is also the fist part of the exam, which involves preliminary discussion and planning, division of labor, and…

Phonotactic probability, neighborhood density, and onset density were manipulated in 4 picture-naming tasks. Experiment 1 showed that pictures of words with high phonotactic probability were named more quickly than pictures of words with low phonotactic probability. This effect was consistent over multiple presentations of the pictures (Experiment…

Format dependence implies that assessment of the same subjective probability distribution produces different conclusions about over- or underconfidence depending on the assessment format. In 2 experiments, the authors demonstrate that the overconfidence bias that occurs when participants produce intervals for an uncertain quantity is almost…

Given a set of urns, each filled with a mix of black chips and white chips, what is the probability of drawing a black chip from the last urn after some sequential random shifts of chips among the urns? The Total Probability Formula (TPF) is the common tool to solve such a problem. However, when the number of urns is more than two and the number…

This article describes an illustration of Bayesian inference that has proved popular with students.