Lmst

🥳 Accepted in Res Philosophica

"Reflective" thinking is rife in #cogSci and the #history of ideas.
But we lack a unified definition.
So I synthesized one.
Just 2 key factors.
Not just unifying, but useful!

Audiopaper: https://byrdnick.com/archives/28904/upon-reflection-ep-15-a-two-factor-explication-of-reflection

Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d628j

Maybe @Dockers opted for the misspelled "TruTemp" #branding because #philosophy had already taken "Truetemp".

Aside: I recently published new data about #thoughtExperiments like Truetemp:
🔒 https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anaf015
🔓 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/y8sdm

#cogSci #xPhi #trademark #marketing

A photo of Docker's TruTemp365 tag on the waist band of a pair of pants.

"Suppose a person, whom we shall name Mr. Truetemp, undergoes brain surgery by an experimental surgeon who invents a small device which is both a very accurate thermometer and a computational device capable of generating thoughts. ... Now imagine, ..., that he has no idea that the tempucomp has been inserted in his brain, is only slightly puzzled about why he thinks so obsessively about the temperature, but never checks a thermometer to determine whether these thoughts about the temperature are correct. He accepts them unreflectively.... Thus, he thinks and accepts that the temperature is 104 degrees. It is. Does he know that it is? Surely not."

Lehrer, K. (1990). Theory of Knowledge. Routledge. pp 162-163

Maybe @Dockers opted for the misspelled "TruTemp" #branding because #philosophy had already taken "Truetemp".

Aside: I recently published new data about #thoughtExperiments like Truetemp:
🔒 https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anaf015
🔓 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/y8sdm

#cogSci #xPhi #trademark #marketing

Can group work/discussion cultivate #criticalThinking?

General #surgery trainees randomly assigned to team-based learning (rather than traditional curricula) had better reflection test scores (n = 36).

🔓 Preprint: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-6439748/v1

#edu #medicine #cogSci #higherEd #teaching

Spatial Data-Management (1979) https://lobste.rs/s/bququq #pdf #cogsci #design
https://www.media.mit.edu/speech/papers/1979/bolt_1979_spatial_data-management.pdf

4. Specialist #philosophy feeds #PhilSci: bsky.app/profile/did:... #PhilTech & #PhilAI: bsky.app/profile/did:... #PhilMind: bsky.app/profile/did:... #PhilPerception: bsky.app/profile/did:... #PhilPsych & #CogSci: bsky.app/profile/did:... (experimental) ¹ Individuals ² Organisations

#AlgorithmAversion is a tendency to judge errors in automated decisions more harshly than errors in human decisions.

Telling people a decision is typically made by machines eliminated or even reversed the #bias.

🔓 https://doi.org/10.1017/jdm.2025.8

#AI #cogSci #xPhi #business #edu #tech

Methods and initial result (pages 7 and 8).

Other results from Study 1 (pages 9 and 10)

One more plot from Study 2 and the beginning of the discussion section (pages 17 and 18)

📚 Publication News from CIIT Lab @ IJCAI 2025 Ijcai:
Last week, the paper “The Delta of Though: Channeling Rivers of Commonsense Knowledge in the Sea of Metaphorical Interpretations” by Antonio Lieto, Gian Luca Pozzato and Stefano Zoia has been accepted at the prestigious International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2025) that will be held in Montreal next August (16-22).

📝 Title: The Delta of Though: Channeling Rivers of Commonsense Knowledge in the Sea of Metaphorical Interpretations

🔍 Abstract:
We propose a system called METCL (Metaphor Elaboration in Typicality-Based Compositional Logic) able to generate and identify metaphors by using the TCL reasoning framework, specialized in human-like commonsense concept combination. We show thatMETCL is able to improve both state of-the-art Large Language Models (e.g DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o, Qwen2.5-Max) and symbolic ones in the task of metaphor identification. Additionally,
we show how the metaphors generated by METCL are generally well accepted by human subjects.
The obtained results are encouraging and pave the way to research in automatic metaphor generation and comprehension based on the assumption that metaphors interpretation can be partially regarded as a categorization problem relying on generative commonsense concept combination.

#ai #commonsensereasoning #conceptcombination, #metaphor #cogsci #computationalcreativity

Link to the paper: https://lnkd.in/dqVpz74E

@cognition @academicchatter

I'm presenting at, attending, and posting about this week's Behavioral #Science & #Policy Association conference.

My posts are over on #BlueSky (because the BSPA is not yet in the Fediverse): https://bsky.app/profile/byrdnick.com/post/3lo4wrwj5bs2o

#cogSci #behavioralScience #econ #edu #healthcare #policing

Is reflective reasoning always better?

In "Bounded Reflectivism..." (2022), I argued that #cogSci data show reflection is NOT always best: https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12534

Another #AI paper finds this: intuitive #LLM prompts were better for "common sense" tasks: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.12470

Pages 5 and 6 (more methods and some results)

Pages 7 and 13 (more results and methods)

Another correlational study of #AI use and #CriticalThinking draws unmerited causal conclusions.

This one found a *positive* correlation between AI use and (self-report-derived) critical thinking.

Participants ≅100 pre-service teachers

https://doi.org/10.59400/fes2727

#edu #cogSci

Title, author, and abstract (with my revisions)

People were less averse to #risk (d = 0.4) when making #prenatalTesting decisions in their SECOND #language — even when they seemed to understand the relevant information.

https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.70016

#parenting #cogSci #medicine #genetics #edu #probability #stats #linguistics #econ

I'm #teaching at #Bucknell Tuesday
- Kahneman's peak-end rule & #socialMedia
- Global Analytic #Atheism: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412525000198
- Scalable Socratic Reflection: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370132037
- Strategic Reflection in #AI, #HCI, #cogSci: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390166382

https://byrdnick.com/teaching

Byrd, N. (2020). Causal Network Accounts of Ill-Being: Depression & Digital Well-Being. In C. Burr & L. Floridi (Eds.), Ethics of Digital Well-Being: A Multidisciplinary Approach (pp. 221–245). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50585-1_11

Byrd, N., Stich, S., & Sytsma, J. (2025). Analytic atheism and analytic apostasy across cultures. Religious Studies. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412525000198

(2024, November). Experiments In Reflective Equilibrium Using The Socrates Platform. Society for Judgment and Decision Making, New York City. https://researchgate.net/publication/370132037

Byrd, N. (2025, April 26). Strategic Reflectivism In Intelligent Systems. Workshop on Human-AI Interaction for Augmented Reasoning. CHI ’25, Yokohama Japan. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390166382

Is reflective reasoning always slower than, say, intuition?

A paper used process dissociation to explicate deliberate control:
- it wasn't reliably slower
- it didn't reliably involve more self-reported deliberation (such as stopping to think)

https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231251325087

#cogSci

Title, authors, abstract, and introduction.

Some assumptions and initial behavioral results.

Reaction time and self-reported deliberation results.

A bit repetitive but still terrific episode on Merleau-Ponty. Probably worth your time if you are a #cogsci or #neuro person. Embodiment/Enactivism and all that jazz ultimately go back to him (and Husserl & Heidegger, but his work is key to later developments e.g. Gibson).

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2nyjawhtjiof2wn7aqvtpwlm/post/3llen3ckow22n

Yet another paper showing dual-minded #LLMs (intuitive + reflective) can improve accuracy-cost tradeoffs: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.12329

As I argue in #StrategicReflectivism, pragmatic switching between the two modes is key to intelligent systems: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390166382

#AI #cogSci

$Figure 4: Overview of speculative thinking. A small model generates most output but selectively delegates challenging segments—marked by structural cues such as paragraph breaks (“\n\n”) followed by reflective phrases like “wait,” “alternatively,” or “hold on”—to a stronger model. Small models often produce verbose or incoherent outputs at these points, while larger models handle them concisely. The proposed speculative thinking preserves efficiency while leveraging the large model’s strength when most needed.$

Do people diagnosed with #autism respond differently to moral dilemmas?

In MINORS, sacrificial harm waned with age, more slowly in the ASD group: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05795-6

In ADULTS, decisions were similar: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.112889

#philosophy #cogSci #psychiatry #ethics #xPhi

Labusch, M., Perea, M., Sahuquillo-Leal, R., Bofill-Moscardó, I., Carrasco-Tornero, Á., Cañada-Pérez, A., & García-Blanco, A. (2022). Development of Moral Judgments in Impersonal and Personal Dilemmas in Autistic Spectrum Disorders from Childhood to Late Adolescence. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05795-6

Mantchala, S., Gosling, C. J., Trémolière, B., & Moutier, S. (2025). Relationship between reasoning, autistic and alexithymic traits in moral judgments. Personality and Individual Differences, 233, 112889. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.112889

Does thinking aloud disrupt reasoning?

We didn't find effects on a verbal reflection test (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37103261), but Shealy et al. found effects on word count, completion time, and DLPFC activity during a design task (N = 50).

https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2023.87

#cogSci #neuroscience

Thinking aloud did not impact performance. Figure 1 affirms our pre-registered hypothesis and prior meta-analytic work (Fox et al. 2011): we did not detect an interference effect of thinking aloud on the number of lured or correct responses on the vCRT.

Figure 1. The effect of thinking aloud on (A) the number of lured responses and (B) the number of correct responses on the verbal cognitive reflection test (vCRT) in Study 1 (N = 99). Error bars represent a standard error.

The control group spent more time designing ...(t = 2.94, p = 0.005) compared to the think-aloud group. ...design sketches produced by the control group included significantly more words (statistic = 203, p = 0.05) than the think-aloud group. The total number of combined words verbalized and written to describe their design ideas for the think-aloud group was significantly more (statistic = 532.5, p < 0.001) compared to ...the control group. [...] Differences in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) were observed in Channel 2 (statistic=303, p = 0.016) and Channel 3 (statistic=316, p = 0.006), and in the left dorsolateral PFC, in Channel 35 (statistic=300, p = 0.02).

Does asking people to justify their answer improve subsequent answers?

In two experiments (N > 300), students asked to justify their answers performed better on multiple choices immediately afterward (and maybe even 48 hours later).

https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15040477

#edu #cogSci #psychology