Citation

Juslin P, Winman A, Persson T. Cognition 1995; 54(1): 99-130.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1995, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

7851081

Abstract

In a recent paper Wagenaar (1988) suggested that overconfidence can be used as an indicator of reconstructive processes which allow responses based on inference to be distinguished from responses based on retrieval. The ecological models (Björkman, in press; Gigerenzer, Hoffrage,&Kleinbölting, 1991; Juslin, 1993a, 1993b, 1994) provide a more positive view of the calibration of reconstructive responses. In this paper we compare these two views and argue that overconfidence cannot be considered a reliable indicator of reconstructive processes since people may be well calibrated fortasks that require inference, provided that tasks are selected in offunbiased manner. Instead, we discuss two different models: the response-independence model which is appropriate to retrieval, and the response-dependence model which applies to inference. These two models predict different distributions of solution probabilities and they therefore provide a criterion by which we can distinguish between direct retrieval and reconstruction. In two empirical studies modelled after Experiment 1 in Wagenaar's (1988) paper it is shown that calibration can be very similar and quite reasonable bothfor tasks that are dominated by inference and tasks that are dominated by retrieval processes. In Experiment 2 we show that the two conditions nevertheless differ in regard to the distributions of solution probabilities in the manner predicted by the two response models presented in the paper. It isproposed that the issue of which is the most appropriate interpretation of solution probabilities is neglected, and that the criterion should be of interest also to applications outside the domain of calibration research.

Language: en