Colloquium on Cognitive Science

Previous research suggests that individuals vary in their ability to tolerate uncertainty, but there is a lack of information on how people with a lower tolerance for uncertainty make decisions in uncertain situations. This is especially true for research on physicians’ decision-making, despite the importance that their diagnoses may have. We hypothesized that people with a lower tolerance cope by using heuristics, such as the use of arbitrary numerical cutoffs (“Number Absolutism”) to guide decision-making. Participants were given a series of hypothetical scenarios involving numbers in which they would have to make judgments and decisions. For example, “Kai’s temperature is 95.4F after working outside. People are diagnosed with hypothermia if their temperature is 95.0F or lower. If you were Kai’s doctor, what is the likelihood you would treat him for hypothermia? How likely do you think it is that the doctor will treat him for hypothermia?” We also measured their Tolerance of Uncertainty and statistical reasoning abilities. In addition, we examined the role of expertise on use of numerical cutoffs as a heuristic by collecting data from medical students and a non-expert online sample. We found that there were individual differences in how people dealt with uncertainty (i.e., how number absolutist they were), and that people with better statistical reasoning abilities were less likely to rely on arbitrary numerical cut offs when making hypothetical decisions. 

Working memory (WM) is a fundamental cognitive capacity that declines with age, and this decline is further exacerbated in older adults (OA) with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Recent evidence suggests that training improves WM performance in healthy OA.  However, it is unclear whether similar effects are observed in individuals with MCI. In the present study, participants with amnestic-MCI (aMCI) completed a ten-day WM training program and additional neuropsychological (NP) tasks. During each training session, participants completed six rounds of an adaptive verbal WM task where the number of letters to be remembered (i.e., set size) increases with improving performance. NP tasks were administered once before the WM training program and once after. We predicted that training gains resulting from the WM training task would be evident, and indicated by a significant increase in mean set size achieved from session 1 to session 10. Supporting this prediction, a large effect size for the aMCI group revealed significant WM performance improvements on the WM training task after ten consecutive training sessions. Cognitive training also has the potential to generate gains in additional cognitive domains, and this effect is known as “transfer”. The present study measured transfer effects as correlations between WM training gains and the difference in post- vs. pre- training NP scores. Our results suggest that the adaptive cognitive training program was beneficial in improving WM performance for individuals with aMCI, but there were limited findings of transfer effects in this population. Investigating the real-world benefits of cognitive training in OA diagnosed with cognitive impairment is important to assess the ecological impacts resulting from training programs.