Why students are biased by heuristics: Examining the role of inhibitory control, conflict detection, and working memory in the case of overusing proportionality

Inhibitory Control was needed in Level-1 Visual Perspective Taking: A Developing Negative Priming Study

Aim

Previous studies have found that both children and adults have difficulties in dealing with judgments in which self-perspective differs from other-perspective, even in level-1 perspective-taking. However, the underlying cognitive mechanism of this is still unclear. In the present study, we designed a negative priming (NP) paradigm of the dot-perspective task to examine whether inhibitory control was required to overcome egocentric bias in level-1 visual perspective-taking in children and adults. We observed an NP effect in both children (n= 43) and adults (n= 40). However, there was no significant difference between children and adults on the magnitude of the NP effect, indicating that when children could overcome the egocentric bias, they had inhibitory control ability comparable to that of adults in level-1 other-perspective-taking.

Background

Visual perspective-taking is an indispensable ability in social interaction; hence, it has attracted great attention from researchers. However, the mechanism underlying this process remains unclear. The present study aimed to investigate the role of inhibitory control in level-1 visual perspective-taking from a developmental perspective in order to understand the performance differences in perspective-taking tasks between children and adults.

Methods

The NP paradigm was applied to the dot-perspective task. Participants' response times (RTs) and error rates (ERs) were recorded during the experiment. A 2 (trial type: test vs control, within-subject) × 2 (age: children vs adults) mix-design ANOVA was used to analyse the RTs and ERs data separately.

Results

We observed an NP effect for both children (7.31, t (42) = 2.78, p < 0.01, Cohen's d = 0.22) and adults (27.58, t (39) = 2.31, p < 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.21). However, the difference in the magnitude of the NP effect between children and adults was not significant (t (81) = 0.54, p = 0.59).

Conclusion

Inhibitory control was needed to overcome egocentric bias in level-1 visual perspective-taking for both children and adults. Moreover, when children could overcome egocentric bias, they had an inhibitory control ability comparable to that of adults.

Inhibiting the Whole Number Bias in a Fraction Comparison Task: An Event-Related Potential Study

Introduction

People often use heuristics derived from natural number tasks to solve fraction comparison tasks. For instance, one may falsely consider a fraction with a larger natural number to be the larger in magnitude, as in the case of 1/5 vs 1/4. We hypothesized that inhibitory control was needed to overcome this type of bias.

Methods

To test the hypothesis, Event-related potentials (ERP) were collected when participants were conducting fraction comparison tasks that designed with the negative priming paradigm. Twenty-eight adult participants performed three types of fraction comparison tasks: congruent items, incongruent items and neutral items.

Results

We found a negative priming effect in terms of response time. Consistently, ERP results demonstrated larger N1 and N2 amplitudes and a smaller P3 amplitude in the test trial than in the control trial.

Conclusion

These findings indicated that adults still need to inhibit the “larger natural number-larger fraction” misleading strategy when solving fraction comparison tasks with common components.