Biomedical subjects

Woo-Kyoung Ahn

Publications and source records attributed to Woo-Kyoung Ahn.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

The meaning and computation of causal power: comment on Cheng (1997) and Novick and Cheng (2004).

D. Hume (1739/1987) argued that causality is not observable. P. W. Cheng (1997) claimed to present "a theoretical solution to the problem of causal induction first posed by Hume more than two and a half centuries ago" (p. 398) in the form of the power PC theory (L. R. Novick & P. W. Cheng, 2004). This theory claims that people's goal in causal induction is to estimate causal powers from observable covariation and outlines how this can be done in specific conditions. The authors first demonstrate that if the necessary assumptions were ever met, causal powers would be self-evident to a reasoner--they are either 0 or 1--making the theory unnecessary. The authors further argue that the assumptions the power PC theory requires to compute causal power are unobtainable in the real world and, furthermore, people are aware that requisite assumptions are violated. Therefore, the authors argue that people do not attempt to compute causal power.

Cognition↗

PubMed2003

Understanding behavior makes it more normal.

Meehl (1973) has informally observed that clinicians will perceive a patient as being more normal if they can understand the patient's behaviors. In Experiment 1, undergraduate participants received descriptions of 10 people, each with three characteristics (e.g., frequently suffers from insomnia) taken from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). When the characteristics formed a plausible causal chain, adding a causal explanation increased perceived normality; but when a causal chain was implausible, perceived normality decreased. In Experiments 2 and 3, a negative life event (e.g., is very stressed out due to her workload) was added as an explanation for the first characteristic in a three-characteristic causal chain. Undergraduates, graduate students in clinical psychology, and expert clinicians all reliably perceived the patients as being more normal with these explanations than without them, confirming Meehl's prediction.

Cognition↗

PubMed2002

Effect of theory-based feature correlations on typicality judgments.

In the present study, we examine what types of feature correlations are salient in our conceptual representations. It was hypothesized that of all possible feature pairs, those that are explicitly recognized as correlated (i.e., explicit pairs) and affect typicality judgments are the ones that are more likely theory based than are those that are not explicitly recognized (i.e., implicit pairs). Real-world categories and their properties, taken from Malt and Smith (1984), were examined. We found that explicit pairs had a greater number of asymmetric dependency relations (i.e., one feature depends on the other feature, but not vice versa) and stronger dependency relations than did implicit pairs, which were statistically correlated in the environment but were not recognized as such. In addition, people more often provided specific relation labels for explicit pairs than for implicit pairs; these labels were most often causal relations. Finally, typicality judgments were more affected when explicit correlations were broken than when implicit correlations were broken. It is concluded that in natural categories, feature correlations that are explicitly represented and affect typicality judgments are the ones about which people have theories.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

The influence of naive causal theories on lay concepts of mental illness.

Two experiments, incorporating both real-life (Experiment 1) and artificial (Experiment 2) stimuli, demonstrated that lay concepts of mental disorders can be reliably predicted from subjects' naive causal theories about those disorders. Symptoms that are deeper causes (X, where X causes Y, which causes Z) are more important in lay concepts than intermediate causes (Y), which in turn are more important than terminal effects (Z). In addition, symptoms that cause or are caused by other symptoms are more important in lay concepts than symptoms not participating in any causal relationships. Implications of these results for current models of categorization and for research on lay theories of mental disorders are discussed, and future directions for research are suggested.

Humans↗