TY  - UNPB
AV  - public
TI  - Mapping the intuitive investigation: Seeking, evaluating and explaining the evidence
M1  - Doctoral
Y1  - 2022/02/28/
UR  - https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10143442/
EP  - 397
ID  - discovery10143442
N2  - The human mind has developed numerous cognitive tools to allow us to navigate the uncertainty of the world and make sense of situations and events. In this thesis I present a descriptive account of some of these tools by probing people?s ability to: evaluate, seek, and explain evidence and information. This was achieved by appraising people?s behaviour in controlled experiments ? predominantly representing legal-investigative scenarios ? utilising normative causal models (e.g., causal Bayesian networks), and uncovering the alternative strategies that people employed when reasoning under uncertainty.

In Chapter 4, I investigate people?s ability to engage in a pattern of reasoning termed ?explaining away? and propose, and find empirical support towards, intuitive theories that address why the observed inference errors were made. In Chapter 5, I outline how people search for, and evaluate, evidence in a sequential investigative information-seeking paradigm ? finding that people do not seek information simply to maximize a given utility function but rather are driven by additional strategies which are sensitive to factors such as demands of the task and a novel form of risk aversion. I extend these findings to forensic professionals, and utilise a naturalistic study employing mobile eye-trackers during a mock crime scene investigation to elucidate the key role that ?asking the right questions? plays when engaging in sense-making practices ?in the wild?. 

In Chapter 6, I explore people?s preferences for certain types of information relating to opportunity and motive at various stages of the legal-investigative process. Here, I demonstrate that people prefer ?motive? accounts of crimes (analogous to a teleology preference) at different stages of the investigative process. In an additional two studies I demonstrate that these preferences are context-sensitive:  namely, that ?motive? information tends to be moreincriminating and less exculpatory. In a final set of experiments, outlined in Chapter 7, I investigate how drawing causal models of competing explanations of the evidence affects how these same explanations are evaluated ? arguing that graphically representing the evidence bolsters people?s understanding of the probabilistic and logical significance of the causal structures drawn.

In sum, this thesis provides a rich descriptive account of how people engage in various aspects of sense-making and decision-making under uncertainty. The work presented in this thesis ultimately aims to increase the ecological and descriptive validity of normative causal frameworks utilised in the cognitive sciences ? whilst informing  ways  to  formalise  decision-making  practices  in  real-world  specialised domains.
N1  - Copyright © The Author 2022.  Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).  Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms.  Access may initially be restricted at the author?s request.
PB  - UCL (University College London)
A1  - Liefgreen, Alice
ER  -