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Katya Tentori

spacer Katya Tentori is professor at the Facoltà di Scienze Cognitive and researcher at the Experimental Psychology Labs (CIMeC).

Research areas and projects

PSYCHOLOGY OF INDUCTIVE REASONING

In inductive reasoning, a finite number of statements (for instance statements deriving from observation) form a set of premises which may either foster or undermine the credibility of a hypothesis. This kind of reasoning represents an object of remarkable interest for the psychology of thinking. Indeed, inductive reasoning processes play a crucial role in many human activities such as diagnosis, learning and prediction. In an inductive argument, the truth of the premises does not allow to establish the truth or falsity of the hypothesis concerned. Therefore, inductive arguments are not classified as logically (that is, deductively) valid or invalid, but rather as more or less strong depending on how the premises (if true) affect the conclusion. By reference to the epistemological literature, inductive strength can be analyzed in terms of confirmation theory. In particular, several non-equivalent probabilistic “measures of confirmation” (viz. inductive strength, or evidential impact) have been proposed in the Bayesian tradition.

Our research project on the psychology of inductive reasoning involves:
a) the assessment of the relative descriptive adequacy of competing Bayesian models of confirmation;
b) the experimental investigation on general limits of standard Bayesian approaches and on their cognitive basis;
c) the working out of new and more satisfactory formal models of inductive reasoning;
d) the exploration of possible applications of the psychology of inductive confirmation in traditional areas of study of judgment and decision making.

RESEARCH ON PATIENT-DOCTOR COMMUNICATION AIMED AT THE CONSTRUCTION OF TOOLS THAT FAVOUR INFORMED AND CONSCIOUS CLINICAL DECISIONS

In most clinical contexts doctors do not merely provide information but recommend a course of action as appropriate for their patients. Thus, the quality of the resulting decision does not only depend on the scientific background of the doctor. It is also crucially affected by the doctors’ accuracy in estimating the weights that their patients assign to various relevant aspects of the decision situation at issue. Recent studies suggest that such accuracy cannot be taken for granted, as doctors’ judgments often depart from corresponding evaluations by their patients, making every decisional proxy remarkably risky. This research project addresses this discrepancy with the ultimate aim of setting up tools in order to allow patients to effectively participate when clinical decisions are made.

Our project on medical decision making comprises the following activities:

a) identification of appropriate procedures to elicit decision weights in medical settings;
b) experimental inquiries on the accuracy of doctors’ estimates of their own patients’ decision weights;
c) setting up appropriate tools to help communication between doctor and patient concerning the relevant decision weights.

Selected publications

• Tentori, K., Crupi, V., & Russo, S. (2012). Determinants of the conjunction fallacy: Confirmation versus probability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, in press.

• Crupi, V. & Tentori, K. (2012). Confirmation as partial entailment: A representation theorem in inductive logic. Journal of Applied Logic, in press.

• Crupi, V. & Tentori, K. (2012). A second look at the logic of explanatory power (with two novel representation theorems). Philosophy of Science, in press.

• Tentori, K. & Crupi, V. (2012). On the conjunction fallacy and the meaning of and, yet again: A reply to Hertwig, Benz, and Krauss (2008). Cognition, 122, 123–134.

• Tentori, K. & Crupi, V. (2012). How the conjunction fallacy is tied to probabilistic confirmation: Some remarks on Schupbach (2012). Synthese, 184, 3–12.

• Crupi, V., Chater, N., & Tentori, K. (2012). New axioms for probability and likelihood ratio measures. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, in press.

• Crupi, V. & Tentori, K. (2012). Confirmation Theory, the Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press.

• Mastropasqua, T., Crupi, V., & Tentori, K. (2010). Broadening the study of inductive reasoning: Confirmation judgments with uncertain evidence. Memory & Cognition, 38, 941–950.

• Tentori, K., Crupi, V., & Osherson, D. (2010). Second order probability affects hypothesis confirmation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 129–134.

• Crupi, V., Tentori, K., & Lombardi, L. (2009). Pseudodiagnosticity revisited. Psychological Review, 116, 971–985.

• Tentori, K., Crupi, V., & Osherson, D. (2007). Determinants of confirmation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 877–883.

• Crupi, V., Tentori, K., & Gonzalez, M. (2007). On Bayesian measures of evidential support: Theoretical and empirical issues. Philosophy of Science, 74, 229–252.

• Tentori, K., Crupi, V., Bonini, N., & Osherson, D. (2007). Comparison of confirmation measures. Cognition, 103, 107–119.

• Tentori, K., Bonini, N., & Osherson, D. (2004). The conjunction fallacy: A misunderstanding about conjunction? Cognitive Science, 28, 467–477.

• Tentori, K., Osherson, D., Hasher, L., & May, C. (2001). Wisdom and aging: Irrational preferences in college students but not older adults. Cognition, 81, B87–B96.

 


For the complete list of publications, visit U-Gov catalogue, here.

 

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