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Poletiek, F. H. (2002). [Review of the book Adaptive thinking: Rationality in the real world by G. Gigerenzer]. Acta Psychologica, 111(3), 351-354. doi:10.1016/S0001-6918(02)00046-X.
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Poletiek, F. H. (2002). How psychiatrists and judges assess the dangerousness of persons with mental illness: An 'expertise bias'. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 20(1-2), 19-29. doi:10.1002/bsl.468.
Abstract
When assessing dangerousness of mentally ill persons with the objective of making a decision on civil commitment, medical and legal experts use information typically belonging to their professional frame of reference. This is investigated in two studies of the commitment decision. It is hypothesized that an ‘expertise bias’ may explain differences between the medical and the legal expert in defining the dangerousness concept (study 1), and in assessing the seriousness of the danger (study 2). Judges define dangerousness more often as harming others, whereas psychiatrists more often include harm to self in the definition. In assessing the seriousness of the danger, experts tend to be more tolerant with regard to false negatives, as the type of behavior is more familiar to them. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed. -
Poletiek, F. H. (2002). Implicit learning of a recursive rule in an artificial grammar. Acta Psychologica, 111(3), 323-335. doi:10.1016/S0001-6918(02)00057-4.
Abstract
Participants performed an artificial grammar learning task, in which the standard finite
state grammar (J. Verb. Learn. Verb. Behavior 6 (1967) 855) was extended with a recursive
rule generating self-embedded sequences. We studied the learnability of such a rule in two experiments.
The results verify the general hypothesis that recursivity can be learned in an artificial
grammar learning task. However this learning seems to be rather based on recognising
chunks than on abstract rule induction. First, performance was better for strings with more
than one level of self-embedding in the sequence, uncovering more clearly the self-embedding
pattern. Second, the infinite repeatability of the recursive rule application was not spontaneously
induced from the training, but it was when an additional cue about this possibility was
given. Finally, participants were able to verbalise their knowledge of the fragments making up
the sequences––especially in the crucial front and back positions––, whereas knowledge of the
underlying structure, to the extent it was acquired, was not articulatable. The results are discussed
in relation to previous studies on the implicit learnability of complex and abstract rules.
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