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Mapping the intuitive investigation: Seeking, evaluating and explaining the evidence

Liefgreen, Alice; (2022) Mapping the intuitive investigation: Seeking, evaluating and explaining the evidence. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: Mapping the intuitive investigation: Seeking, evaluating and explaining the evidence
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language: English
Additional information: 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.
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10143442
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