Is Innocence Irrelevant? Collateral Attack on Criminal Judgments

Aging and the impact of irrelevant information on social judgments.

We conducted 2 experiments to specifically examine whether older adults are more susceptible to the negative impact of irrelevant evaluative information when making social judgments. Young (ages 20-44), middle-aged (ages 45-63), and older (ages 65-85) adults were presented with descriptions of people consisting of positive and negative traits that varied in relevance to specific occupations. Th...

Is Task-Irrelevant Learning Really Task-Irrelevant?

In the present study we address the question of whether the learning of task-irrelevant stimuli found in the paradigm of task-irrelevant learning (TIPL) [1]-[9] is truly task irrelevant. To test the hypothesis that associations that are beneficial to task-performance may develop between the task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli, or the task-responses and the task-irrelevant stimuli, we desi...

Illusions of Learning: Irrelevant Emotions Inflate Judgments of Learning

People use assessments of how much they have learned to choose and recommend instructors, seminars, and weekend trips. How do people assess how much they have learned? Recent theorizing has depicted emotion as a cue for learning, and so people may be misled by recent emotional states to infer that they have learned more than they actually have. Four studies showed that people associated emotion...

Incorporating the Irrelevant: Anchors in Judgments of Belief and Value

Some Case-Refinement Strategies for Case-Based Criminal Summary Judgments

We report means for simplifying case instances in a case-based reasoning system for criminal summary judgments in Taiwan. We merge similar case instances, remove irrelevant terms, and weight important terms. The best method combination reduces the size of the case database by more than 60% of the most complete case database while maintaining the classification quality at about 80%.