It is important to reveal how humans evaluate an explanation of the recent development of explainable artificial intelligence. So, what makes people feel that one explanation is more likely than another? In the present study, we examine how explanatory virtues affect the process of estimating subjective posterior probability. Through systematically manipulating two virtues, Simplicity—the number of causes used to explain effects—and Scope—the number of effects predicted by causes—in three different conditions, we clarified two points in Experiment 1: that Scope's effect (...) is greater than Simplicity's; and that these virtues affect the outcome independently. In Experiment 2, we found that instruction about the explanatory structure increased the impact of both virtues' effects but especially that of Simplicity. These results suggest that Scope predominantly affects the estimation of subjective posterior probability, but that, if perspective on the explanatory structure is provided, Simplicity can also affect probability estimation. (shrink)

Over the history of the study of visual perception there has been great success at discovering countless visual illusions. There has been less success in organizing the overwhelming variety of illusions into empirical generalizations (much less explaining them all via a unifying theory). Here, this article shows that it is possible to systematically organize more than 50 kinds of illusion into a 7 × 4 matrix of 28 classes. In particular, this article demonstrates that (1) smaller sizes, (2) slower speeds, (...) (3) greater luminance contrast, (4) farther distance, (5) lower eccentricity, (6) greater proximity to the vanishing point, and (7) greater proximity to the focus of expansion all tend to have similar perceptual effects, namely, to (A) increase perceived size, (B) increase perceived speed, (C) decrease perceived luminance contrast, and (D) decrease perceived distance. The detection of these empirical regularities was motivated by a hypothesis, called “perceiving the present,” that the visual system possesses mechanisms for compensating neural delay during forward motion. This article shows how this hypothesis predicts the empirical regularity. (shrink)

This study investigated the interaction between sampling behavior and preference formation underlying subjective decision making for like and dislike decisions. Two-alternative forced-choice tasks were used with closely-matched musical excerpts and the participants were free to listen and re-listen, i.e. to sample and resample each excerpt, until they reached a decision. We predicted that for decisions involving resampling, a sampling bias would be observed before the moment of conscious decision for the like decision only. The results indeed showed a gradually increasing (...) sampling bias favouring the choice before the moment of overt response for like decisions. Such a bias was absent for dislike decisions. Furthermore, the participants reported stronger relative preferences for like decisions as compared to dislike decisions. This study demonstrated distinct differences in preference formation between like and dislike decisions, both in the implicit orienting/sampling processes prior to the conscious decision and in the subjective evaluation afterwards. (shrink)