Rational thinking and cognitive sophistication: development, cognitive abilities, and thinking dispositions.

We studied developmental trends in 5 important reasoning tasks that are critical components of the operational definition of rational thinking. The tasks measured denominator neglect, belief bias, base rate sensitivity, resistance to framing, and the tendency toward otherside thinking. In addition to age, we examined 2 other individual difference domains that index cognitive sophistication: cognitive ability (intelligence and executive functioning) and thinking dispositions (actively open-minded thinking, superstitious thinking, and need for cognition). All 5 reasoning domains were consistently related to cognitive sophistication regardless of how it was indexed (age, cognitive ability, thinking dispositions). The implications of these findings for taxonomies of developmental trends in rational thinking tasks are discussed.

Practitioner review: do performance-based measures and ratings of executive function assess the same construct?

BACKGROUND: Both performance-based and rating measures are commonly used to index executive function in clinical and neuropsychological assessments. They are intended to index the same broad underlying mental construct of executive function. The association between these two types of measures was investigated in the current article. METHOD AND RESULTS: We examined the association between performance-based and rating measures of executive function in 20 studies. These studies included 13 child and 7 adult samples, which were derived from 7 clinical, 2 nonclinical, and 11 combined clinical and nonclinical samples. Only 68 (24%) of the 286 relevant correlations reported in these studies were statistically significant, and the overall median correlation was only .19. CONCLUSIONS: It was concluded that performance-based and rating measures of executive function assess different underlying mental constructs. We discuss how these two types of measures appear to capture different levels of cognition, namely, the efficiency of cognitive abilities and success in goal pursuit. Clinical implications of using performance-based and rating measures of executive function are discussed, including the use of these measures in assessing ADHD.

Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot.

The so-called bias blind spot arises when people report that thinking biases are more prevalent in others than in themselves. Bias turns out to be relatively easy to recognize in the behaviors of others, but often difficult to detect in one's own judgments. Most previous research on the bias blind spot has focused on bias in the social domain. In 2 studies, we found replicable bias blind spots with respect to many of the classic cognitive biases studied in the heuristics and biases literature (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Further, we found that none of these bias blind spots were attenuated by measures of cognitive sophistication such as cognitive ability or thinking dispositions related to bias. If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability. Additional analyses indicated that being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases. We discuss these findings in terms of a generic dual-process theory of cognition.

The Cognitive Reflection Test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks.

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. In this study, we showed that the CRT is a more potent predictor of performance on a wide sample of tasks from the heuristics-and-biases literature than measures of cognitive ability, thinking dispositions, and executive functioning. Although the CRT has a substantial correlation with cognitive ability, a series of regression analyses indicated that the CRT was a unique predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks. It accounted for substantial additional variance after the other measures of individual differences had been statistically controlled. We conjecture that this is because neither intelligence tests nor measures of executive functioning assess the tendency toward miserly processing in the way that the CRT does. We argue that the CRT is a particularly potent measure of the tendency toward miserly processing because it is a performance measure rather than a self-report measure.

Decision-making and cognitive abilities: A review of associations between Iowa Gambling Task performance, executive functions, and intelligence.

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has been used to study decision-making differences in many different clinical and developmental samples. It has been suggested that IGT performance captures abilities that are separable from cognitive abilities, including executive functions and intelligence. The purpose of the current review was to examine studies that have explicitly examined the relationship between IGT performance and these cognitive abilities. We included 43 studies that reported correlational analyses with IGT performance, including measures of inhibition, working memory, and set-shifting as indices of executive functions, as well as measures of verbal, nonverbal, and full-scale IQ as indices of intelligence. Overall, only a small proportion of the studies reported a statistically significant relationship between IGT performance and these cognitive abilities. The majority of studies reported a non-significant relationship. Of the minority of studies that reported statistically significant effects, effect sizes were, at best, small to modest, and confidence intervals were large, indicating that considerable variability in performance on the IGT is not captured by current measures of executive function and intelligence. These findings highlight the separability between decision-making on the IGT and cognitive abilities, which is consistent with recent conceptualizations that differentiate rationality from intelligence.

On the relative independence of thinking biases and cognitive ability.

In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. These thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, "less is more" effects, affect biases, omission bias, myside bias, sunk-cost effect, and certainty effects that violate the axioms of expected utility theory. In a further experiment, the authors nonetheless showed that cognitive ability does correlate with the tendency to avoid some rational thinking biases, specifically the tendency to display denominator neglect, probability matching rather than maximizing, belief bias, and matching bias on the 4-card selection task. The authors present a framework for predicting when cognitive ability will and will not correlate with a rational thinking tendency.

Heuristic and analytic processing: age trends and associations with cognitive ability and cognitive styles.

Developmental and individual differences in the tendency to favor analytic responses over heuristic responses were examined in children of two different ages (10- and 11-year-olds versus 13-year-olds), and of widely varying cognitive ability. Three tasks were examined that all required analytic processing to override heuristic processing: inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning under conditions of belief bias, and probabilistic reasoning. Significant increases in analytic responding with development were observed on the first two tasks. Cognitive ability was associated with analytic responding on all three tasks. Cognitive style measures such as actively open-minded thinking and need for cognition explained variance in analytic responding on the tasks after variance shared with cognitive ability had been controlled. The implications for dual-process theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed.