Fluency as a Substitute for Validity in Cue Selection

在做出判断时，人们通常会使用各种各样的线索。例如，一个法律案件可能涉及许多证据，陪审员可以用这些证据来判断有罪或无罪。同样，病人可能表现出多种症状，这些症状可以帮助医生诊断疾病。一些线索比其他线索更有可能成功地预测结果，许多先前的模型都假设人们更重视更有效的线索。然而，哪些线索是最有效的并不总是显而易见的，并且在理论和经验的基础上，使用线索效度来进行线索加权是相对不可信的。这个项目提出线索加权可能基于流畅性而不是有效性。所谓流畅，我们指的是信息处理的容易程度。流畅性在许多领域都是一种重要的认知工具，因为人们总是能够获得自己的流畅体验，而流畅性与很多事情都相关。由于联想学习和启动的基本认知机制，提示流畅性可能与提示效度相关。因此，流畅性既是认知上合理的，也是生态上有效的线索加权机制。这个项目使用了一系列广泛的聚合范例来探索这种可能性。

When making judgments, people typically use a variety of cues. For example, a legal case may involve a number of pieces of evidence that jurors could use to judge guilt or innocence. Similarly, a patient may exhibit multiple symptoms that can help a doctor diagnosis an ailment. Some cues are more likely than others to successfully predict an outcome and many previous models have assumed that people give more weight to more valid cues. However, it is not always obvious which cues are the most valid, and the use of cue validity for cue weighting is relatively implausible on both theoretical and empirical grounds. This project proposes that cue weighting may be based on fluency rather than validity. By fluency, we mean the ease with which information is processed. Fluency has been shown to be an important cognitive tool in many domains, because people always have access to their own fluency experiences, and fluency is correlated with so many things. In particular, cue fluency likely to be correlated with cue validity, because of the basic cognitive mechanisms of associative learning and priming. Therefore fluency is both a cognitively plausible and ecologically valid mechanism for cue weighting. This project uses a wide array of converging paradigms to explore this possibility.