1985 — 1987 |
Rips, Lance J |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Cognition and Argumentation
This project examines the cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for people's ability to understand argumentative prose. In prose of this kind, writers offer a series of sentences that lead to a final conclusion. In order to make sense of such a passage, readers must reconstruct the inferences that connect one sentence to the next, filling in implicit steps and placing explicit ones in proper relationship within the logical structure. The aim of this proposal is to design and test a theory of this comprehension process. The theory takes the form of a computational model that specifies how people interpret the sentences in an argumentative text, relate them logically to earlier sentences, and store them in memory. The model takes account of textual connectives (e.g., therefore, for, or however) and textual hints about inference methods (e.g., that the conclusion follows by a particular rule or from a previous result). Three groups of proposed experiments test the model's reasoning and memory assumptions by comparing its performance to that of adult subjects. The first group is based on the model's distinction between argumentative steps that are predictable and those that are unpredictable from previous steps; the experiments test this distinction by timing subjects as they comprehend and verify individual text lines. A second group of studies examines how the order of sentences in the text and the textual connectives in the sentences affect subjects' ability to identify the intended logical relations. The final set of experiments probes subjects' recall and recognition of alternative points of view within the global argument structure.
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0.948 |
1990 — 1992 |
Rips, Lance J |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Conceptions of Mental Activity |
0.948 |
1996 — 2000 |
Rips, Lance |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Cognition in Informal Reasoning @ Northwestern University
9514491 RIPS This project will examine the way people understand and judge informal arguments. Informal arguments take place when individuals exchange views on belief about an assertion or a possible action. For example, debates between friends or family members, classroom sparring about an idea, scientific exchanges about empirical results or theories, and negotiations in business are all informal arguments. This research will develop a theory of these arguments in terms of the conversational moves that participants can make within them, for example, asking for a justification, giving a reason, offering an objection, or conceding a point. This theory will determine to which of the argument's claims each participant is committed publicly at any stage of the argument and will identify changes in commitment as the argument unfolds. Three groups of experiments will assess and refine the theory. The first group will test predictions about people's memory for arguments and understanding of them. In these experiments, people will read a series of naturalistic dialogues between two characters and will then judge which of the dialogues' claims each of the characters accepts. The theory's predictions about changes in the characters' commitments as the dialogue proceeds will be compared to the people's judgments. The theory also predicts that arguments vary in the demands they make on participants' and overhearers' memory, since some arguments require participants to keep track of claims in order to return to them later. The second set of experiments will examine people's judgments about burden of proof. In this context, burden of proof is the responsibility a participant has to support his or her case. The theory predicts that which participant has the greater burden of proof depends, among other factors, on the number of claims that are currently under dispute and the strength of support for these claims. The experiments will evaluate the theory's predi ctions about shifts in burden of proof as currently disputed claims become settled. They will also investigate the effects on burden of proof of making an argument's first or last claim. The final group of experiments will investigate circular reasoning or question-begging in arguments. The fallacy of begging the question occurs when participants presuppose the conclusion of an argument in trying to justify one of its premises. In the context of most arguments, however, the points that a participant argues for (the conclusions) and the points argued from (the premises) emerge as the argument unfolds and depend on which points other participants accept. Thus, in some circumstances, but not in others, repetitions of a conclusion can beg the question. The experiments will examine conditions under which subjects recognize instances of question begging. ***
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0.915 |
1999 — 2003 |
Rips, Lance |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
The Cognitive Basis of Seam Effects in Panel Surveys @ Northwestern University
This project investigates a type of error called the "seam effect" that occurs in national surveys and that affects the quality of their data. Some panel surveys, such as the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the Consumer Expenditure Survey, interview respondents three or four times a year; however, questions on these surveys ask for information about each of the preceding months. For example, a respondent might be interviewed in April and asked during that interview to provide information about his or her expenditures for each of the months of January, February, and March. The same respondent might be interviewed in July for expenditures during April, May, and June. Previous analyses of the data from these surveys show that month-to-month changes in respondents' answers are much greater when the data come from successive interviews than when they come from the same interview. In the example just mentioned, changes in the level of expenditures would be greater between March and April (data gathered from separate interviews) than between other adjacent months (data gathered from the same interview). Prior studies strongly suggest that these differences are not due to true changes between March and April, but are due to response error. The purpose of this project is to develop a model of this effect that can help predict its severity and that will aid in eliminating it or adjusting for it statistically.
The studies in the project investigate the seam effect using a procedure in which respondents answer questions about information supplied in the experiments themselves. In this way, the experiments control variables that might alter the size of the effect, and they monitor the respondents' accuracy. The strategy in these experiments is to vary separately factors that might affect respondents' memory for earlier information (e.g., the importance or salience of that information) and factors that might affect respondents' willingness to estimate or to guess at an answer. Because the first set of factors may have more impact on later parts of the response period and the second set of factors more impact on earlier parts, their combined influence can increase or decrease the size of the seam effect. These experiments test this hypothesis. This research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and a consortium of federal statistical agencies under the Research on Survey Methodology Funding Opportunity.
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0.915 |