English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

The growing interest in individual differences in decision making has been accompanied by a growing interest in developmental differences. A developmental perspective has the power to elucidate the role that brain development and experience play in decision making. However, it also has the potential to mislead. In contrast to adult participants, who one assumes are similar in their understanding of an experimental paradigm, children of different ages may view a paradigm through very different lenses. Of course, the point of a developmental perspective is to investigate how decision making changes across development, but the findings are only valid in so far as each age group's understanding of the experimental paradigm is equivalent.  Gollin's (1965) levels-by-levels approach addresses this issue by highlighting the value of manipulating the “organismic dimension” (level 1) and “task dimension” (level 2) concurrently. While it is commonplace for developmental psychologists to manipulate the organismic dimension (i.e., the age of participants), the task dimension is often overlooked. This manipulation comes in one of two forms: Gollin's (1965) approach of systematically increasing task complexity and Bitterman's (1964) approach of identifying and controlling for “contextual variables” (i.e., factors other than the one of interest that adversely impact a subject's performance). Comparative psychology perhaps holds the clearest examples of these two approaches (Macphail, 1985). Gollin's (1965) systematic approach is exemplified by Lashley's (1929) investigation of the impact of brain lesions on maze learning in rats. Lashley (1929) systematically varied both the size of the lesion (i.e., the organismic dimension) and the complexity of the maze (i.e., the task dimension). The lesions had little impact on simple mazes, suggesting that basic learning was not impaired, but as the complexity of the mazes increased, the lesions had greater and greater impact and this impact was mediated by the size of the lesion.  The most marked example of Bitterman's (1964) approach derives from Harlow's (1949) learning set paradigm. The paradigm was designed to assess an animal's ability to “learn how to learn” and was initially thought to provide a way of ranking species by intelligence (e.g., Hodos, 1970; Jerison, 1973; Warren, 1974). In short, subjects are presented with a series of problems in which two stimuli are presented; selecting one stimulus results in a reward while selecting the other stimulus results in a punishment. Subjects are said to have developed a learning set once they start to select the rewarded stimulus on the second trial of each new problem (i.e., Win Stay: If rewarded on Trial 1, respond to the same stimulus on Trial 2; Lose Shift: If punished on Trial 1, respond to the other stimulus on Trial 2). Initial studies employing the learning set paradigm found marked species differences. Specifically, most primate species rapidly acquired a learning set, while rats continued to perform at chance after several thousand trials (Hodos, 1970). Slotnick and Katz (1974), however, demonstrated that rats trained with olfactory, rather than visual stimuli, acquired a learning set at a similar speed to chimpanzees. For rats, therefore, the visual modality of the stimuli used in the initial experiments was a contextual variable.

frontiers in psychology

Gollin's (1965) levels-by-levels approach: the importance of manipulating the task dimension when assessing age-related changes and individual differences in decision making