730 publications from this institution
: Fault trees represent problem situations by organizing things that could go wrong into functional categories. Such trees are essential devices for analyzing and evaluating the fallibility of complex systems. They follow many different formats, sometimes by design, other times inadvertently. Major results were: people were quite insensitive to what had been left out of a fault tree, increasing the amount of detail for the tree as a whole or just for some of its branches produced small effects on perceptions, and the perceived importance of a particular branch was increased by presenting it in pieces (as two separate component branches). Aside from their relevance for the study of problem solving, such results may have important implications for how best to inform the public about technological risks and to involve it in policy decisions and how experts should perform fault-tree analyses of the risks from technological systems.
When Dick Pownall purchased food for the first successful American conquest of Mt. Everest, he had only the team members' likes and dislikes to guide him. Today, he'd rely on the lessons of the marathon runners. Research with them reveals how diet wins races.
We employed simple gambles to investigate information processing in relation to the compatibility effect.Subjects should be more likely to engage in a deliberative thinking strategy when completing a pricing task rather than a rating task.We used eye-tracking methodology to measure information acquisition and processing in order to test the above hypothesis as well as to show that losses and alternatives with uncertain outcomes are more likely than gains and alternatives with sure outcomes to be processed through a deliberative thinking process.Results showed that pupil dilations, fixation duration and number of fixations increased when subjects evaluated the gambles with a pricing task.Additionally, the number of fixations increased as the gamble outcome became increasingly negative and when the outcome was uncertain (vs.sure).Fixations were also predictive of subjects' final evaluations of the gambles.We discuss our results in light of the cognitive processes underlying different response modes in economic preferences.
