Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an increasingly popular web service for paying people small rewards to do human computation tasks. Current uses of MTurk typically post independent parallel tasks. This research explores an alternative iterative paradigm, in which workers build on each other's work. We run a couple of experiments comparing the efficacy of this paradigm in two different problem domains...

Accounts of how people learn functional relationships between continuous variables have tended to focus on two possibilities: that people are estimating explicit functions, or that they are performing associative learning supported by similarity. We provide a rational analysis of function learning, drawing on work on regression in machine learning and statistics. Using the equivalence of Bayesi...

This paper describes a system for modeling human task-level intent through the use of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). To maintain safety and efficiency during physicallyproximal human-robot collaboration, it is necessary for both human and robot to communicate or otherwise deconflict physical actions. Human-state aware robot intelligence is necessary to facilitate this. However, physical acti...

When testing hypotheses, rare or unexpected observations are normatively more informative than common observations, and recent studies have shown that participants’ behavior reflects this principle. Research has also shown that, when asked to test conditional hypotheses (“If X, then Y”) that are abstract or unfamiliar, participants overwhelmingly consider a supporting observation mentioned in t...

Whereas past research has focused on the downsides of task switching, the present research uncovers a potential upside: increased creativity. In two experiments, we show that task switching can enhance two principal forms of creativity—divergent thinking (Study 1) and convergent thinking (Study 2)—in part because temporarily setting a task aside reduces cognitive fixation. Participants who cont...

Physical appearance influences behavior in a number of environments, yet surprisingly little is known about the influence of physical attractiveness on the bargaining process. We conducted an ultimatum game experiment to investigate the influence of physical attractiveness and gender on ultimatum game decisions. Results from this study revealed no significant differences in the offers or demand...

This paper describes an algorithm for classifying human motion patterns (trajectories) observed in video sequences. We address this task in a hierarchical way: high-level activities are described as sequences of low-level motion patterns (dynamic models). These low-level dynamic models are simply independent increment processes, each describing a specific motion regime (e.g., ‘‘moving left’’). ...

MODEL-BASED GUIDANCE FOR HUMAN-INTENSIVE PROCESSES

The primary purpose of this research was to subject Conlon and Garland’s (1993; Garland & Conlon, 1998) project completion hypothesis to a stronger test than it has faced in the past. We conducted an experiment in which we manipulated the degree of completion, sunk-cost amount, and anticipated sales price for a hypothetical real estate development project. The sales price information allowed pa...

All cancers are caused by somatic mutations; however, understanding of the biological processes generating these mutations is limited. The catalogue of somatic mutations from a cancer genome bears the signatures of the mutational processes that have been operative. Here we analysed 4,938,362 mutations from 7,042 cancers and extractedmore than 20 distinct mutational signatures. Some are present ...