Text

theses

In this dissertation, I will investigate how people make judgments and decisions in the domain of health. My overarching goal is to bridge the gap between behavioral health research and cognitive science. While both fields have made important strides in health decision making, insufficient communication between fields prevents health researchers from benefiting from important findings in cognition, and vice versa. For example, previous models in behavioral health are based mainly on patient health data, and have not been evaluated in terms of their implications for cognition, or computationally. Of particular interest in my research program is the importance of prior expectations, and I will focus on three inter-related questions bearing on the importance of prior expectations. Chapters 2 and 3 will evaluate people’s prior expectations for illness statistics; chapter 4 will address how people use prior expectations for prediction of illness durations; and sections 5 and 6 will investigate how these prior expectations are integrated with new evidence (e.g., a diagnosis from a doctor). Furthermore, chapter 5 will propose a rational model to describe how people’s health judgments change as they encounter new information.

ETD_10340

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-ysxt-7s24

ETD doctoral

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