A representational approach to ecological psychology is presented. This paper identifies a computational-level commonality in ecological psychology research related to passability of apertures. It is argued that a cognitive mechanism capable of comparing the geometric properties of an environment and the geometric properties of the agent can be used to support judgments for action in space.

An alternative view of presence is introduced based on existential philosophy and ecological psychology. This view favors a Heideggerian/Gibsonian metaphysic over the more conventional rationalistic orientation. In this alternative view, notions of subjective presence and objective presence no longer exist. Presence is instead tied to one’s successfully supported action in the environment, this...

In a seminal work, Tversky and Kahneman showed that in some contexts people tend to believe that a conjunction of events (e.g., Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement) is more likely to occur than one of the conjuncts (e.g., Linda is a bank teller). This belief violates the conjunction rule in probability theory. Tversky and Kahneman called this phenomenon the "conjunctio...

Euro-Canadians and Chinese typically hold different theories about change; Euro-Canadians often engage in linear thinking whereas Chinese often engage in non-linear thinking. The present research investigated the effects of culture-specific theories of change in two related gambling fallacies: the gambler's fallacy (GF; the belief that one is due for a win after a run of losses) and the hot-han...

The research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has nowadays extended its attention to the study of persuasive technologies. Following this line of research, in this paper we focus on websites and mobile applications in the e-commerce domain. In particular, we take them as an evident example of persuasive technologies. Starting from the hypothesis that there is a strong connection between logi...

OBJECTIVE Incorrectly concluding that the probability of a joint event (such as a combination of clinical findings) is greater than the probability of any one of these events alone is known as the conjunction fallacy. It is one type of cognitive error in estimation of probability to which physicians are known to be prone. The purpose of this study was to determine whether beginning medical stud...

Learners’ language has been described as transitional competence (Corder, 1967) and interlanguage (Selinker, 1972), and it has been categorized as a natural language (Adjemian, 1976). This indicates that learners possess their own languages. However, the question remains whether or not learners’ language has been explained and understood on its own, and not merely compared to target-language (T...

Oppenheimer and Monin (2009) recently found that subjectively rare events are taken to indicate a longer preceding sequence of unobserved trials than subjectively common events, an effect which they refer to as the retrospective gambler’s fallacy. The current paper extends this idea to the situation where participants judge the likelihood of streak continuation. Participants were told about a s...

The work of Tversky and Kahneman on intuitive probability judgment leads to the following prediction: The judged probability that an instance belongs to a category is an increasing function of the typicality of the instance in the category. To test this prediction, subjects in Experiment 1 read a description of a person (e.g., "Linda is 31, bright, ... outspoken") followed by a category. Some s...