The numerator bias exists in millions of real-world comparisons.
Acta Psychol (Amst)
; 213: 103248, 2021 Feb.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33453615
Fractions are crucial, from math and science education to daily activities, but they are hard. A puzzling aspect of fractions is that people over-rely on the numerator when comparing a pair of fractions. Previous work has considered this numerator bias mostly as a reasoning mishap. Still, in a vast amount of pairwise comparisons, across many real-world domains, not just education textbooks, we report a high prior probability that the larger fraction has the larger numerator, and, for a relevant case, we provide formal arguments why. The existence of such a regularity suggests that the numerator bias may reflect a rational adaptation that detects and exploits likely events. In a pair of visual-proportion tasks (discrete and continuous fractions), we confirm that the numerator bias in participants adapts to experimented regularities. Even though weak education and math abilities play a role, adaptation to informative priors outside the classroom poses a challenge to educators, learners, and decision-makers.
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1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Solución de Problemas
/
Cognición
Límite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Acta Psychol (Amst)
Año:
2021
Tipo del documento:
Article
Pais de publicación:
Países Bajos