ERIC Number: EJ952446
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011-Nov
Pages: 8
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0278-7393
EISSN: N/A
Detecting and Reacting to Change: The Effect of Exposure to Narrow Categorizations
Chakravarti, Amitav; Fang, Christina; Shapira, Zur
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v37 n6 p1563-1570 Nov 2011
The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion are of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people's reactions to change. In this article we document a novel effect: Decision makers' reactions to a change (e.g., a visual change, a technology change) were systematically affected by the type of categorizations they encountered in an unrelated prior task (e.g., the response categories associated with a survey question). We found that prior exposure to narrow, as opposed to broad, categorizations improved decision makers' ability to detect change and led to stronger reactions to a given change. These differential reactions occurred because the prior categorizations, even though unrelated, altered the extent to which the subsequently presented change was perceived as either a relatively large change or a relatively small one. (Contains 5 tables and 3 figures.)
Descriptors: Cognitive Processes, Change, Responses, Decision Making Skills, Classification, Context Effect, Difficulty Level, Visual Environment, Technological Advancement, Test Bias, Pictorial Stimuli, Semantics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A