The accruals anomaly, a well-documented financial phenomenon lacking a comprehensive scientific explanation, is addressed in this study through the proposition of a novel behavioral theory. Our theory centers around the concept of a cross-modality anchoring bias, wherein the mental anchor is the magnitude of operating income, modified by the intensity of discretionary accounting accruals. This anchoring effect distorts the distribution of future cash flows used in valuation processes, potentially explaining the anomaly’s persistence and robustness. To test this theory, an experiment was conducted, involving participants with suitable financial knowledge and varying levels of practical experience. The experimental results support the presence of the cross-modality anchoring effect, as estimated future cash flows differed significantly across accruals categories, despite being drawn from the same distribution. The magnitude of the bias was influenced by the level of practical financial experience and gender, with women exhibiting lower susceptibility to the interdimensional anchor

In this paper, we first extract from Susan Carey’s seminal account of the origin of concepts a notion of rationality, which is (1) applicable to human infants and non-human animals; (2) significantly different from the notions of rationality prevalent in behavioral ecology and yet, like these notions, amenable to empirical testing; (3) conceptually more fundamental than the latter notions. Relatedly, this notion (4) underlies a proto-conceptuality ascribable, by a key component of Carey’s account, to human infants and non-human animals. Based on a Kantian-inspired analysis of fully-fledged conceptuality and the type of rationality underlying it, we then show (1) the profound difference between the type of rationality extracted from Carey’s account and the rationality of human adults; (2) related fundamental differences between the types of conceptual representation that these types of rationality respectively ground. By showing this, we highlight fundamental aspects of conceptual representations that are missing from Carey’s account of the origin of concepts. Based on this, we finally argue that, as ingenious and explanatorily valuable as Carey’s account of the origin of concepts is, it is only a partial account of this origin.

In this paper we examine the question of whether complexity-like explanations can be applied to the psychology of individuals, and its implications for the scope of complexity explanations of social phenomena. We start by outlining two representational-cum-computational models of the mind—a symbolic model and a networks or connectionist one—and their pros and cons. Based on this we then outline a radical, non-representational and non-computational alternative model that has been gaining ground recently, and which has significant affinities with complexity explanations in social science. Deploying neo-Kantian considerations, we then argue that due to the discursivity, or conceptual dimension of our cognitive system, the radical alternative must be incorrect insofar as humans are concerned. Indeed, human psychology must involve, at least partly, a representational understanding of the sort provided by the symbolic model. Relatedly, we show how the discursiviry of human cognition complicates our psychology and makes it difficult to account for. Finally, we briefly address the question of how the complicated nature of individual psychology, implied by human discursivity, may affect complexity explanations of social behavior.

OPINION article Front. Psychol., 17 February 2015Sec. Decision Neuroscience Volume 6 - 2015 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00159

This paper examines the adequacy of an evolutionary-oriented notion of rationality—ecological rationality—that has recently been proposed in economics. Ecological rationality is concerned with what it is rational to do, and in this sense is a version of what philosophers call ‘practical rationality’. Indeed, the question of the adequacy of ecological rationality as it is understood in the paper, is the question of whether ecological rationality is a genuine notion of practical rationality. The paper first explicates and motivates the notion of ecological rationality by (a) explicating the notion of practical rationality, (b) grounding ecological rationality in an evolutionary approach to the emotions which is mainly illustrated by the example of fear, and (c) outlining the reasons adduced in economics for generalizing ecological rationality beyond the emotions. The paper then argues that (d) the raison d’être of practical rationality is first and foremost a specific role it plays in the explanation of behavior, or in telling why it has occurred. Finally, based on (a)–(d), the paper argues that (e) ecological rationality lacks a constitutive feature of practical rationality—namely, normativity—which is related to the latter’s basic explanatory role, and thus cannot be considered a genuine notion of practical rationality. While the paper focuses on the economic version of ecological rationality, its conclusions apply just as well to other, related, versions of the ecological notion that have been proposed in biology and evolutionary psychology.

EDITORIAL article Front. Psychol., 05 June 2012Sec. Cognitive Science https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00184

Résumé Les échanges économiques et sociaux se produisent souvent entre des personnes étrangères les unes aux autres et qui ne peuvent donc pas se reposer sur une histoire commune ou sur la perspective de futures interactions dans le but d’établir une confiance mutuelle. Les théoriciens des jeux formalisent ce problème en termes de « jeux en un coup » (une seule période) - comme peut l’être le « jeu de la confiance » - et prédisent que la non-coopération est l’équilibre théorique de ce jeu dans la mesure où le premier joueur, ne pouvant attendre que le second joueur rétribue de manière réciproque la confiance qu’il aurait mise en lui, est contraint à ne pas investir. Bohnet et Zeckhauser (2004) proposent que, du fait d’une aversion à la trahison, les individus préfèrent éviter des situations dans lesquelles ils pourraient être trahis. Nous développons l’argument selon lequel l’émergence d’un tel comportement peut être également due à une forme d’aversion au regret. Classification JEL : A12, A13, D81.

OPINION article Front. Psychol., 05 January 2012Sec. Cognitive Science https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00390

We present here the concept of rational emotions: Emotions may be directly controlled and utilized in a conscious, analytic fashion, enabling an individual to size up a situation, to determine that a certain "mental state" is strategically advantageous and adjust accordingly. Building on the growing body of literature recognizing the vital role of emotions in determining decisions, we explore the complementary role of rational choice in choosing emotional states. Participants played the role of "recipient" in the dictator game, in which an anonymous "dictator" decides how to split an amount of money between himself and the recipient. A subset of recipients was given a monetary incentive to be angry at low-split offers. That subset demonstrated increased physiological arousal at low offers relative to high offers as well as more anger than other participants. These results provide a fresh outlook on human decision-making and contribute to the continuing effort to build more complete models of rational behavior.

L'escompte hyperbolique ou myopie décisionnelle a été corrélée à des problèmes de croissance dans différentes régions du globe (Mullainathan 2005), le changement climatique (Dasgupta 2008), la faiblesse de l'épargne (Thaler et Benartzi 2004), et d'autres problèmes économiques. Nous développons l'hypothèse selon laquelle une meilleure compréhension des bases psychologiques et biologiques de l'incohérence des choix intertemporels permettra de mieux évaluer la pertinence et l'efficacité des politiques publiques visant à contrecarrer les effets de ces anomalies comportementales individuelles au niveau agrégés. La neurobiologie des choix intertemporels peut aider les approches dites « paternalistes douces » à sélectionner finement les environnements institutionnels qui, sans entamer l'autonomie des choix individuels, contribueraient à les rendre généralement plus optimaux. L'approche neuroscientifique du choix intertemporel contribue à l'écologie des systèmes sociaux futurs dans la mesure où elle permet de confirmer certaines hypothèses évolutionnaires sur la sélection des comportements d'escompte hyperbolique. A travers ce type de confirmation, cette approche permet de déplacer l'idée paternaliste traditionnelle d'une adaptation des individus à des cadres institutionnels incorporant certains principes normatifs de rationalité, en faveur d'un paternalisme doux (ou d'un non-paternalisme tout court) qui cherche à adapter les environnements institutionnels à la réalité biologique des individus.

Reverse Inference ( RI ) is an imaging-based type of inference from brain states to mental states, which has become highly widespread in neuroscience, most especially in neuroeconomics. Recent critical studies of RI may be taken to show that, if cautiously used, RI can help achieve research goals that may be difficult to achieve by way of behavior-based procedures alone. But can RI exceed the limits of these procedures and achieve research goals that are impossible for them to achieve alone? By way of answering this question we show that a conception of the mind—type identity—under which the answer is in the positive, is untenable for reasons that strongly support another conception of the mind—functionalism—under which the answer must be in the negative. On this basis we then conclude that RI cannot exceed the limits of behavior-based procedures in cognitive psychology.

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Neuroeconomics Modeling Intertemporal Choices Neuroeconomics and Intertemporal Choices Future Research Should Use Discount Rates as Phenotypes in Genetic Studies Other Factors Affecting Individual's Time Preferences References

Emotion research is guided both by the view that emotions are points in a dimensional space, such as valence or approach-withdrawal, and by the view that emotions are discrete categories. We determined whether effective connectivity of amygdala with medial orbitofrontal cortex (MOFC) and lateral orbitofrontal cortex (LOFC) differentiates the perception of emotion faces in a manner consistent with the dimensional and/or categorical view. Greater effective connectivity from left MOFC to amygdala differentiated positive and neutral expressions from negatively valenced angry, disgust, and fear expressions. Greater effective connectivity from right LOFC to amygdala differentiated emotion expressions conducive to perceiver approach (happy, neutral, and fear) from angry expressions that elicit perceiver withdrawal. Finally, consistent with the categorical view, there were unique patterns of connectivity in response to fear, anger, and disgust, although not in response to happy expressions, which did not differ from neutral ones.

Behavioral data supports the commonsense view that babies elicit different responses than adults do. Behavioral research also has supported the babyface overgeneralization hypothesis that the adaptive value of responding appropriately to babies produces a tendency for these responses to be overgeneralized to adults whose facial structure resembles babies. Here we show a neural substrate for responses to babies and babyface overgeneralization in the amygdala and the fusiform face area (FFA). Both regions showed greater percentage BOLD signal change compared with fixation when viewing faces of babies or babyfaced men than maturefaced men. Viewing the first two categories also yielded greater effective connectivity between the two regions. Facial qualities previously shown to elicit strong neural activation could not account for the effects. Babyfaced men were distinguished only by their resemblance to babies. The preparedness to respond to infantile facial qualities generalizes to babyfaced men in perceivers' neural responses just as it does in their behavioral reactions.

Language and communication deficits are core features of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), even in high-functioning adults with ASD. This study investigated brain activation patterns using functional magnetic resonance imaging in right-handed adult males with ASD and a control group, matched on age, handedness, and verbal IQ. Semantic processing in the controls produced robust activation in Broca’s area (left inferior frontal gyrus) and in superior medial frontal gyrus and right cerebellum. The ASD group had substantially reduced Broca’s activation, but increased left temporal (Wernicke’s) activation. Furthermore, the ASD group showed diminished activation differences between concrete and abstract words, consistent with behavioral studies. The current study suggests Broca’s area is a region of abnormal neurodevelopment in ASD, which may be linked with semantic and related language deficits frequently observed in ASD.

A stimulus is considered a reward if an animal will perform work in order to receive it. In this study we asked whether pictures of food can be rewards for human subjects, with reward value operationalized as the physical effort the subjects would exert to continue viewing the pictures. We designed a procedure, modeled on the animal literature of operant conditioning, under which subjects viewed two sets of pictures of appetizing and unappetizing food items, and controlled how long each picture remained in view by repeatedly pressing pairs of keys on a computer. Subjects performed this procedure twice, once while hungry and once after consuming a meal. We found that in general, appetizing food pictures were viewed longer than unappetizing food pictures. When subjects were hungry (in a deficit state specific to food reward), this difference in favor of appetizing food pictures was even greater than when subjects were satiated. These results show that pictures of food items do indeed have reward value in the absence of the food items themselves, and more generally, that pictures of rewards can stand in for actual rewards. Reward value of food pictures / 3 Introduction Reward is a concept that refers to the positive value an animal attributes to an object, an event, or an internal state. Rewards are defined operationally by the effort an animal will expend to consume or get closer to them. As an incentive to behavior, a rewarding stimulus acts either via a memory of a previous reward experience or via salient properties of the stimulus (i.e., the sight and smell of food) which orient the animal to it. As a reinforcement of previous behavior, a rewarding stimulus acts to increase the probability that preceding behavioral responses are repeated; such positive reinforcers increase the frequency of behavioral reactions during learning and maintain these behaviors after learning (Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997). The processing of reward information is a fundamental component of the cognitive and neural substrates of normal behavior, and its malfunction has been suggested in a number of mental disorders (Breiter et al., 1996; Breiter & Rosen, 1999), including abnormal eating behavior (Schachter, 1968, 1971). The reward value associated with a stimulus is not a static, intrinsic property, but is rather a function of the animal’s internal state at the time and of its past experience with the stimulus. Primary homeostatic functions lead to drives such as eating, drinking, and thermal regulation on the basis of deficit states, or changes in physiological conditions. Deficit states increase the reward value of stimuli that have the potential to reduce that deficit. For example, the reward value of food increases during hunger (Cabanac, 1971). To the brain, all rewards are initially perceived and transcribed as distributed sets of signals in primary sensory cortices. Only subsequently are these representations processed into discrete information dimensions that can be useful for planning behavior. The initial perceptual representations in the brain may be thought of as lying on a continuum between an abstract code Reward value of food pictures / 4 (e.g., the word “cheeseburger”) and the encoding of internal physiological signals (e.g., the increase in plasma glucose levels, hormone fluctuations, and other physiological events associated with the consumption and digestion of a cheeseburger). Between these extremes lie other inputs such as visual, olfactory, and taste representations of food. Although it is well-known that the consumption, taste, or smell of food can have rewarding effects (as reviewed by Rolls, 1999), it is not clear that viewing pictures of food items will be reinforcing in the absence of the actual food items. Pictures of food may be too close to the abstract end of the continuum to have a reinforcing effect. The same question can be asked of many reward categories, and the answer has important consequences for our understanding of reward representations. Food, however, is an especially apt category for study because the deficit state of hunger can readily be induced (and relieved) in a short-term experiment, and pictures of food are near-veridical representations of the underlying rewards. Furthermore, there is evidence that neural pathways that animals and humans will work to activate (via electrical selfstimulation) can also be activated in monkeys by the sight of food (Rolls, 1999). In this study, we asked two questions: (1) Can pictures of homeostatic rewards, in this case food items, function as rewards by causing human subjects to work in order to continue viewing them? (2) Does this valuation of food pictures vary depending on the subjects’ physiological state, such as hunger or satiety? We used a “keypress” procedure adapted from bar-pressing paradigms in the operant conditioning literature to operationalize reward value as the amount of work subjects would perform to continue viewing pictures of food items. Methods that quantify work to measure reward value have advantages over methods traditionally used in cognitive and social psychology, such as rating scales and monetary valuations (Ariely & Loewenstein, 2000). In particular, our keypress procedure measures an objective, continuous Reward value of food pictures / 5 parameter of physical behavior rather than a subjective judgement expressed in arbitrary codes or units. We expected that subjects would generally work harder to view pictures of appetizing food than pictures of non-appetizing food, and that the deficit state of hunger would magnify this effect. Such a finding would imply that pictures of food can indeed serve as rewards. Method Participants Fourteen male subjects (ages 22–40, mean 27.8, SD 6.1) participated as paid volunteers. All were right-handed, non-vegetarian, and free of psychiatric problems (including eating disorders), neurological disease, and illicit substance dependence. None reported engaging in dietary restraint in order to lose weight, or smoking more than one pack of cigarettes per day. Subjects had body-mass indices between 20.6 and 29.3 (mean 24.8, SD 2.1). To verify that subjects exhibited normal eating behavior, we administered the Three Factor Eating Questionnaire (Stunkard & Messick, 1985), which measures three dimensions of human eating behavior: cognitive restraint, disinhibition, and perceived hunger. Subjects’ mean scores (Restraint, mean 6.5, SD 4.6; Disinhibition, mean 5.9, SD 3.3; Hunger, mean 5.4, SD 3.1) were within the published normal ranges. All subjects gave written informed consent, and their rights were protected. Materials We used 222 photograph-quality digital pictures of food, which were approximately 250 pixels wide and high (on average), corresponding to an area of approximately 10 degrees of 1. Body Mass Index (BMI) is the most frequently used formula for estimating body fat stores. BMI is the ratio between an individual’s weight and the square of his/her height (kg/m). The normal range of BMI for adults is 18– 25 kg/m. Overweight is defined as a BMI between 25 and 30, and obesity is defined as a BMI greater than 30 (World Health Organization Expert Committee, 1995). Reward value of food pictures / 6 visual angle on each side when viewed at a distance of 50 cm. The pictures were selected to fall into four different categories: (1) “Normal,” or normally-colored food items, (2) “Discolored,” or discolored food items, (3) “Prepared,” or prepared food items, and (4) “Unprepared,” or unprepared food ingredients. (See Figure 1 for examples of each category.) The Normal category contained 68 different pictures of food, retrieved from sources on the Internet. The Discolored category contained the same 68 pictures, but with their colors altered so as to no longer appear natural: Using PhotoShop 5.5 software (Adobe Systems) on an iMac DV computer (Apple Computer) we shifted the hue for reds by +75 and the hue for yellows by –110. The Prepared and Unprepared food categories each consisted of 43 different pictures retrieved from the same sources. These pictures were matched between groups (for example, a picture of a cooked steak was matched with a picture of a raw steak). The following additional written instruments were used: (1) a pre-session state questionnaire, which requested subjective ratings, on a 100-mm visual analogue scale, of 13 physiological or psychological conditions: sluggish, full/satiated, emotionally agitated, alert, anxious, thirsty, happy, desire to eat, energetic, emotionally calm, hungry, sad, and tired; (2) a similar post-session state questionnaire; (3) a post-study questionnaire, which asked about subject performance during the study. Procedure Each subject participated in two experimental sessions separated by 3–10 days, one in a “Hungry” state and the other in a “Satiated” state. The order was counterbalanced so that half of the subjects were in the Hungry state before the Satiated state, and vice-versa for the other half of the subjects. Although all subjects participated in both conditions, they were told in advance that their condition would be selected at random for each session, and that their condition for the Reward value of food pictures / 7 second session would be independent of their condition during the first session. Each subject came to each session between 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM, having been instructed to not eat after 12:00 midnight the night before, and not at all on that day. Subjects were allowed to drink water, as well as any caffeinated beverages they would normally drink, but no other fluids. Subjects were told that they would receive a meal as part of each session. Subjects filled out the Three Factor Eating Questionnaire before their first session, and the presession questionnaire at the beginning of each session. Subjects in the Hungry condition filled out the pre-session questionnaire, completed the experimental task, and were then given a meal of t

Reward dysfunction may be implicated in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This study applied a behavioral probe, known to activate brain reward regions, to subjects with PTSD. Male heterosexual Vietnam veterans with (n = 12) or without (n = 11) current PTSD were administered two tasks: (a) key pressing to change the viewing time of average or beautiful female or male facial images, and (b) rating the attractiveness of these images. There were no significant group differences in the attractiveness ratings. However, PTSD patients expended less effort to extend the viewing time of the beautiful female faces. These findings suggest a reward deficit in PTSD.