UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Understanding information use in multiattribute decision making
    (2016) Chrabaszcz, Jeffrey Stephen; Dougherty, Michael R; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    An inference task in one in which some known set of information is used to produce an estimate about an unknown quantity. Existing theories of how humans make inferences include specialized heuristics that allow people to make these inferences in familiar environments quickly and without unnecessarily complex computation. Specialized heuristic processing may be unnecessary, however; other research suggests that the same patterns in judgment can be explained by existing patterns in encoding and retrieving memories. This dissertation compares and attempts to reconcile three alternate explanations of human inference. After justifying three hierarchical Bayesian version of existing inference models, the three models are com- pared on simulated, observed, and experimental data. The results suggest that the three models capture different patterns in human behavior but, based on posterior prediction using laboratory data, potentially ignore important determinants of the decision process.