University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2017 Not Just Noise: Individual Differences in Cognitive Ability and Response Bias Tina Chen University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Cognitive Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Chen, Tina, "Not Just Noise: Individual Differences in Cognitive Ability and Response Bias" (2017). Doctoral Dissertations. 868. https://doi.org/10.7275/9467068.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/868 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NOT JUST NOISE: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY AND RESPONSE BIAS A Dissertation Presented by TINA CHEN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2017 Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences © Copyright by Tina Chen 2017 All Rights Reserved NOT JUST NOISE: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY AND RESPONSE BIAS A Dissertation Presented by TINA CHEN Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________ Caren Rotello, Chair _______________________________________ Jeffrey Starns, Member _______________________________________ Rebecca Ready, Member _______________________________________ Craig Wells, Member ____________________________________ Harold Grotevant, Department Head Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences DEDICATION For my parents. I love you. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, thank you to my amazing advisor Caren Rotello. Your unwavering support, gentle guidance, and academic model have been instrumental in my career path. Thank you for always having an open door and being willing to stop whatever you are doing to help me, whether that is answering a quick administrative question or puzzling over data and talking me down from a panic. Your mentoring has been invaluable, allowing me to explore both research and career opportunities in a safe environment, and I don’t know if I can do enough to demonstrate my appreciation. Thank you also to my dissertation committee: Jeff Starns, Becky Ready, and Craig Wells. I appreciate the thoughtful questions and feedback you’ve provided throughout this process; your expertise has been so helpful. I’d like to thank Aline Sayer for your support and help as well. And thank you to Ben Zobel for your E-Prime knowledge and to Colin Quirk and Brian Dillon for your JavaScript knowledge: programming my dissertation without your help would have been so much more painful. A huge thanks to friends here who have been so essential to this journey: Andrea Cataldo, Will Hopper, and Lap Keung (who indulged my every question about things I should have already known); Merika Wilson and Junha Chang (awesome officemates); Lisa Fiorenzo and Sam Rhodes (who provided wide-ranging support); my GWIS peer mentoring group (for the advice and accountability, especially during the summers!); and my support at MERCYhouse (for grounding me in something other than academia). And finally, thank you to my family. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for all of your faith in me and my ability. Thank to Peter and Vanessa for providing an occasional retreat. Thank you, Mary, for lamenting with me and celebrating with me. v ABSTRACT NOT JUST NOISE: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY AND RESPONSE BIAS FEBRUARY 2017 TINA CHEN, B.S., UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI COLUMBIA Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Caren M. Rotello Response bias is a component of decision making that can be defined as the general willingness to respond a certain way. For example, in recognition memory, one can have a response bias towards responding that a test item has been previously studied, or in reasoning, one can have a response bias towards responding that a conclusion is logically valid. However, not all individuals have the same response bias. Indeed, there is some evidence that response bias is a stable cognitive trait in memory that differs across individuals (Kantner & Lindsay, 2012, 2014). One predictor of this trait may be cognitive ability, since it appears to predict response bias in memory (Zhu et al., 2010) and in reasoning (e.g., Handley & Trippas, 2015). While memory and reasoning have similar decision making components and may be very related (Heit & Hayes, 2011; Heit, Rotello, & Hayes, 2012), this experiment is the first to test whether cognitive ability predicts response bias in both tasks. Experiment 1 showed that higher cognitive ability participants were more conservative than lower cognitive ability participants in reasoning, but not in memory. Experiment 2 showed that participants did generally vi follow task demands to shift their bias some, but this shift was not predicted by cognitive ability. This study shows that further research is needed to examine individual differences in response bias as one way to account for what has previously been treated as noise. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF TABLES ...............................................................................................................x LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... xi CHAPTER ...........................................................................................................................1 1. RESPONSE BIAS ...............................................................................................1 Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 The importance of examining individual differences in response bias .........................................................................................................2 Extant research on individual differences in response bias .......................16 2. EXPERIMENT 1 ...............................................................................................26 Method ...................................................................................................................28 Participants .................................................................................................28 Cognitive tasks ...........................................................................................33 Results ....................................................................................................................34 Variable Measurement, Approach to Analyses, and Hypotheses ..............34 Measures of Cognitive Ability ...................................................................37 Measures of Response Bias .......................................................................42 Accuracy Analyses.....................................................................................47 Response Bias Analyses ............................................................................49 Experiment 1 Discussion .......................................................................................56 viii 3. EXPERIMENT 2 ...............................................................................................58 Method ...................................................................................................................59 Participants .................................................................................................59 Memory Task .............................................................................................61 Results ....................................................................................................................63 Variable Measurement, Approach to Analyses, and Hypotheses ..............63 Measures of Cognitive Ability ...................................................................65 Measures of Response Bias and Response Bias Optimality ......................67 Median Split, ROCs, and Accuracy Analyses ...........................................70 Response Bias ANOVA Analyses .............................................................79 Experiment 2 Discussion .......................................................................................90 4. GENERAL DISCUSSION ................................................................................92 Conclusions from the Current Study......................................................................92 Limitations and Strengths ......................................................................................92 Future Directions ...................................................................................................95 General Conclusions ..............................................................................................97 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................99 ix LIST OF TABLES Table