David R Shanks
Biographic Data
| ID | 1751961 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David R Shanks |
| GIVEN NAMES | David R |
| FAMILY NAME | Shanks |
| SIGNATURE | SHANKS D R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4600-6323 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Kelley’s Paradox and strength skewness in research on unconscious mental processes
A widely adopted approach in research on unconscious perception and cognition involves contrasting behavioral or neural responses to stimuli that have been presented to participants (e.g., old items in a memory test) against those that have not (e.g., new items), and which participants do not discriminate in their conscious reports. We demonstrate that such contrasts do not license inferences about unconscious processing, for two reasons. One is …
Instructional intervention effects on interleaving preference and distance during self-regulated inductive learning
Interleaving (intermixing exemplars from different categories) is more effective in promoting inductive learning than blocking (massing exemplars from a given category together). Yet learners typically prefer blocking over interleaving during self-regulated inductive learning, highlighting the need to develop effective interventions to overcome this metacognitive illusion and promote learners’ practical use of the interleaving strategy. Drawing o…
Measurement and sampling noise undermine inferences about awareness in location probability learning: A modeling approach
Researchers in the experimental tradition often neglect the psychometric properties of their dependent measures. • Here we show that claims that memory-guided visual search is unconscious are undermined by measurement and sampling noise. • We offer a modeling approach to illustrate how a noisy conscious model can generate data apparently coherent with the opposite theory. Occasionally, experimental psychologists enter into the realm of psychometr…
Individual differences in the reactivity effect of judgments of learning: Cognitive factors
Confidence ratings increase response thresholds in decision making
Do changed learning goals explain why metamemory judgments reactively affect memory
Spelling out the Kirundi augment: Prosodic domains, epenthesis and weight
The Kirundi augment is a vowel found before noun class prefixes. I argue that the augment is an epenthetic vowel whose surface characteristics, including deletion, retention and weight, are conditioned by prosodic structure. While the augments of different noun classes present apparent asymmetries, my account unifies all surface representations under a single underlying structure. My arguments mainly focus on three nominal structures: simple nomi…
On the left periphery of the Kirundi noun phrase
In this paper, we examine the structure of Kirundi nominals and the elements that appear on their left periphery, in particulardemonstratives, the locative prefixes mu, ku and i, and the nominal linker na. We analyze these structures from the perspective of the phonology-syntax interface. We show that the Universal Spine Hypothesis, which assumes a fixed order of the functional categories inside the nominal, allows us to explain both the syntacti…
Judgments of learning reactively facilitate visual memory by enhancing learning engagement
Evaluating the conceptual strategy change account of test-potentiated new learning in list recall
Prior testing potentiates new learning, an effect known as test-potentiated new learning (TPNL). Research using lists of related words has established that testing, by free recall, also increases semantic clustering of later recall output. It has been suggested that this is evidence that testing induces a strategy change in encoding and retrieval towards greater conceptual organisation. The current research evaluated whether this conceptual strat…
Mind the Gap Between Comprehension and Metacomprehension: Meta-Analysis of Metacomprehension Accuracy and Intervention Effectiveness
Research has consistently demonstrated that learners are strikingly poor at metacognitively monitoring their learning and comprehension of texts. The aim of the present meta-analysis is to explore three important questions about metacomprehension: (a) To what extent can people accurately discriminate well-learned texts from less well learned ones? (b) What are the (meta)cognitive causes of poor metacomprehension accuracy? and (c) What interventio…
Conscious and unconscious memory and eye movements in context-guided visual search: A computational and experimental reassessment of Ramey, Yonelinas, and Henderson (2019)
Are eye movements unconsciously guided towards target locations in familiar scenes? In a recent eyetracking study, Ramey, Yonelinas, and Henderson (2019) measured eye-movement efficiency (scanpath ratio) and memory judgments when participants searched for targets in repeated and novel scenes. When trials judged new with high confidence were selected, scanpath ratio was lower for old scenes (misses) than for new scenes (correct rejections). In add…
Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind
A provocative look at the unconscious mind that challenges contemporary perceptions and exposes the indefensible science that fostered them. How much of a role does the unconscious play in our decision making? In Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind, authors Ben R. Newell and David R. Shanks would argue: not very much. Behavioral science and public discourse have placed an outsized emphasis on the unconscious mind when it c…
No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.
Monotonicity Revisited: Mass Nouns and Comparisons of Purity
Comparatives with more plus mass noun, like John has more milk than Bill, are naturally analyzed as referencing measure functions, functions like volume or weight that map individuals to degrees. Although such measure functions vary with context as well as the choice of mass noun, there are well known grammatical limitations on this variation. In particular, Schwarzschild (2006) proposes that only monotonic measure functions can enter into the in…
Is probabilistic cuing of visual search an inflexible attentional habit? A meta-analytic review
In studies on probabilistic cuing of visual search, participants search for a target among several distractors and report some feature of the target. In a biased stage the target appears more frequently in one specific area of the search display. Eventually, participants become faster at finding the target in that rich region compared to the sparse region. In some experiments, this stage is followed by an unbiased stage , where the target is even…
Raising awareness about measurement error in research on unconscious mental processes
When judging what you know changes what you really know: Soliciting metamemory judgments reactively enhances children’s learning
Recent studies established that making concurrent judgments of learning (JOLs) can significantly alter (typically enhance) memory itself—a reactivity effect. The current study recruited 190 Chinese children (Mage = 8.68 years; 101 female) in 2020 and 2021 to explore the reactivity effect on children's learning, its developmental trajectory and associated metacognitive awareness. The results showed that making JOLs significantly enhanced retention…
Straight Choices
Correlation analysis to investigate unconscious mental processes: A critical appraisal and mini-tutorial
Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review
Over the last century hundreds of studies have demonstrated that testing is an effective intervention to enhance long-term retention of studied knowledge and facilitate mastery of new information, compared with restudying and many other learning strategies (e.g., concept mapping), a phenomenon termed the testing effect. How robust is this effect in applied settings beyond the laboratory? The current review integrated 48,478 students' data, extrac…
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
Author Correction: A consensus-based transparency checklist
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper
Concept Learning and Representation: Models
Unconscious influences on decision making: A critical review
To what extent do we know our own minds when making decisions? Variants of this question have preoccupied researchers in a wide range of domains, from mainstream experimental psychology (cognition, perception, social behavior) to cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. A pervasive view places a heavy explanatory burden on an intelligent cognitive unconscious, with many theories assigning causally effective roles to unconscious influences…
A re‐examination of probability matching and rational choice
In a typical probability learning task participants are presented with a repeated choice between two response alternatives, one of which has a higher payoff probability than the other. Rational choice theory requires that participants should eventually allocate all their responses to the high‐payoff alternative, but previous research has found that people fail to maximize their payoffs. Instead, it is commonly observed that people match their res…
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
A re‐examination of melioration and rational choice
We examined how people allocate choices between two alternatives when the payoff from each alternative varied as a function of the allocation of recent choices. On any one trial alternative A had a higher immediate payoff than alternative B , but across all trials B had a higher overall payoff than A . Rational choice theory requires that participants allocate all their responses to the alternative with the greatest overall payoff irrespective of…
Search strategies in decision making: The success of “success”
Examination of search strategies has tended to focus on choices determined by decision makers' personal preferences among relevant cues, and not on learning cue‐criterion relationships. We present an empirical and rational analysis of cue search for environments with objective criteria. In such environments, cues can be evaluated on the basis of three properties: validity (the probability that a cue identifies the correct choice if cue values dif…
Human instrumental learning: A critical review of data and theory
This article reviews experimental data from human instrumental learning tasks in which people acquire knowledge about the consequences of their actions. The main part of the paper examines the stimulus conditions which appear to control the acquisition of instrumental knowledge. These conditions include contiguity between the action and outcome, the degree of contingency between them, and also the extent to which the action is a good relative pre…
Characteristics of dissociable human learning systems
A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, (1) between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and (2) between learning that involves the encoding of instances (or fragments) versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Impl…
A re‐examination of probability matching and rational choice
In a typical probability learning task participants are presented with a repeated choice between two response alternatives, one of which has a higher payoff probability than the other. Rational choice theory requires that participants should eventually allocate all their responses to the high‐payoff alternative, but previous research has found that people fail to maximize their payoffs. Instead, it is commonly observed that people match their res…
A re‐examination of melioration and rational choice
We examined how people allocate choices between two alternatives when the payoff from each alternative varied as a function of the allocation of recent choices. On any one trial alternative A had a higher immediate payoff than alternative B , but across all trials B had a higher overall payoff than A . Rational choice theory requires that participants allocate all their responses to the alternative with the greatest overall payoff irrespective of…
Does opposition logic provide evidence for conscious and unconscious processes in artificial grammar learning
Search strategies in decision making: The success of “success”
Examination of search strategies has tended to focus on choices determined by decision makers' personal preferences among relevant cues, and not on learning cue‐criterion relationships. We present an empirical and rational analysis of cue search for environments with objective criteria. In such environments, cues can be evaluated on the basis of three properties: validity (the probability that a cue identifies the correct choice if cue values dif…
Out of control: An associative account of congruency effects in sequence learning
Unconscious influences on decision making: A critical review
To what extent do we know our own minds when making decisions? Variants of this question have preoccupied researchers in a wide range of domains, from mainstream experimental psychology (cognition, perception, social behavior) to cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. A pervasive view places a heavy explanatory burden on an intelligent cognitive unconscious, with many theories assigning causally effective roles to unconscious influences…
Concept Learning and Representation: Models
A consensus-based transparency checklist
We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository
Author Correction: A consensus-based transparency checklist
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper
Correlation analysis to investigate unconscious mental processes: A critical appraisal and mini-tutorial
Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review
Over the last century hundreds of studies have demonstrated that testing is an effective intervention to enhance long-term retention of studied knowledge and facilitate mastery of new information, compared with restudying and many other learning strategies (e.g., concept mapping), a phenomenon termed the testing effect. How robust is this effect in applied settings beyond the laboratory? The current review integrated 48,478 students' data, extrac…
No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.
Monotonicity Revisited: Mass Nouns and Comparisons of Purity
Comparatives with more plus mass noun, like John has more milk than Bill, are naturally analyzed as referencing measure functions, functions like volume or weight that map individuals to degrees. Although such measure functions vary with context as well as the choice of mass noun, there are well known grammatical limitations on this variation. In particular, Schwarzschild (2006) proposes that only monotonic measure functions can enter into the in…
Is probabilistic cuing of visual search an inflexible attentional habit? A meta-analytic review
In studies on probabilistic cuing of visual search, participants search for a target among several distractors and report some feature of the target. In a biased stage the target appears more frequently in one specific area of the search display. Eventually, participants become faster at finding the target in that rich region compared to the sparse region. In some experiments, this stage is followed by an unbiased stage , where the target is even…
Raising awareness about measurement error in research on unconscious mental processes
When judging what you know changes what you really know: Soliciting metamemory judgments reactively enhances children’s learning
Recent studies established that making concurrent judgments of learning (JOLs) can significantly alter (typically enhance) memory itself—a reactivity effect. The current study recruited 190 Chinese children (Mage = 8.68 years; 101 female) in 2020 and 2021 to explore the reactivity effect on children's learning, its developmental trajectory and associated metacognitive awareness. The results showed that making JOLs significantly enhanced retention…
Straight Choices
Spelling out the Kirundi augment: Prosodic domains, epenthesis and weight
The Kirundi augment is a vowel found before noun class prefixes. I argue that the augment is an epenthetic vowel whose surface characteristics, including deletion, retention and weight, are conditioned by prosodic structure. While the augments of different noun classes present apparent asymmetries, my account unifies all surface representations under a single underlying structure. My arguments mainly focus on three nominal structures: simple nomi…
On the left periphery of the Kirundi noun phrase
In this paper, we examine the structure of Kirundi nominals and the elements that appear on their left periphery, in particulardemonstratives, the locative prefixes mu, ku and i, and the nominal linker na. We analyze these structures from the perspective of the phonology-syntax interface. We show that the Universal Spine Hypothesis, which assumes a fixed order of the functional categories inside the nominal, allows us to explain both the syntacti…
Judgments of learning reactively facilitate visual memory by enhancing learning engagement
Evaluating the conceptual strategy change account of test-potentiated new learning in list recall
Prior testing potentiates new learning, an effect known as test-potentiated new learning (TPNL). Research using lists of related words has established that testing, by free recall, also increases semantic clustering of later recall output. It has been suggested that this is evidence that testing induces a strategy change in encoding and retrieval towards greater conceptual organisation. The current research evaluated whether this conceptual strat…
Mind the Gap Between Comprehension and Metacomprehension: Meta-Analysis of Metacomprehension Accuracy and Intervention Effectiveness
Research has consistently demonstrated that learners are strikingly poor at metacognitively monitoring their learning and comprehension of texts. The aim of the present meta-analysis is to explore three important questions about metacomprehension: (a) To what extent can people accurately discriminate well-learned texts from less well learned ones? (b) What are the (meta)cognitive causes of poor metacomprehension accuracy? and (c) What interventio…
Conscious and unconscious memory and eye movements in context-guided visual search: A computational and experimental reassessment of Ramey, Yonelinas, and Henderson (2019)
Are eye movements unconsciously guided towards target locations in familiar scenes? In a recent eyetracking study, Ramey, Yonelinas, and Henderson (2019) measured eye-movement efficiency (scanpath ratio) and memory judgments when participants searched for targets in repeated and novel scenes. When trials judged new with high confidence were selected, scanpath ratio was lower for old scenes (misses) than for new scenes (correct rejections). In add…
Psychology (27 works) · Cognitive psychology (20 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Cognition (14 works) · Artificial Intelligence (10 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Unconscious mind (9 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (8 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (8 works) · Cognitive science (7 works)